This morning, every Maltese and Gozitan waits anxiously for the national election result. So I have decided to spare you any further tension. Instead, let me offer a few relaxing thoughts to pass the time. 

The morning of 8 March 2017, began like any other stormy Wednesday in Gozo. Gale-force winds had battered the islands throughout the night. By half-past nine, Roger Chessell, from Xaghra stood at Dwejra with his camera, hoping to capture the raging sea. He photographed the spray and the fury beneath the great limestone arch. Then, ten minutes later, something happened that no Gozitan ever quite believed would occur.

The Azure Window collapsed into the Mediterranean with a single, terrible sound. Witnesses described it as a deep whoomph, followed by an enormous plume of white spray. When the mist finally settled, the arch had vanished. The pillar that held it had gone too. Nothing remained above the waterline. Centuries of postcards, paintings, and honeymoon photographs disappeared in roughly the time to read this sentence.

For most of us Gozitans, the window seemed eternal. We assumed it had always stood there, watching over Dwejra like a stone sentinel. The truth is rather humbler and stranger. The arch barely features in the old descriptions of the area. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers raved about nearby Fungus Rock, yet ignored the Window entirely. The likely explanation is simple. The arch did not yet exist in any recognisable form.

Scholars believe the complete structure took around five hundred years to carve itself from the cliff. The sea did the patient work, hollowing out a cave, then breaking through to form a bridge. The earliest clear record shows up in a drawing from around 1830. So the icon we mourned was, in geological terms, a relative newcomer. It arrived, dazzled us for a couple of centuries, and then left without warning.

The name carries its own little mystery. Older Gozitans knew the cave entrance to the Inland Sea as it-Tieqa or Għar iż-Żerqa, the blue window or blue cave. When the grand arch finally formed, it seemed to have quietly borrowed that older name for itself. Names travel oddly across these islands. They attach themselves to new wonders and abandon the old ones, much like the tourists who would eventually arrive in their thousands.

And arrive they did, as The Window became Gozo's most photographed face. Film crews adored it. It loomed behind the gods in Clash of the Titans back in 1981. It stood in for far grander coasts in The Count of Monte Cristo. Most famously, it framed a Dothraki wedding in the very first season of Game of Thrones, drawing a fresh generation of pilgrims to Dwejra. Each visitor believed they were photographing something permanent.

Yet The Window had been dying in plain sight for years. Slabs fell from its underside through the 1980s and beyond, slowly widening the opening and thinning its support. Geologist Peter Gatt warned repeatedly that the structure was failing. In December 2016, an emergency order banned anyone from walking across the arch, with fines of fifteen hundred euros for trespassers.

Nobody enforced it as tourists strolled along the top of the doomed bridge mere days before it fell. We Maltese have a peculiar talent for ignoring warnings about things we love. We assume the worst will arrive tomorrow, never today. The Window obliged our optimism right until the moment it did not, choosing the one storm we looked away from.

The collapse wounded something deeper than tourism. Joseph Muscat, then prime minister, called it heartbreaking. Strangers swapped memories online as though grieving for a friend. People recalled first dates, family picnics, and old photographs suddenly turned precious. A lump of eroding limestone had somehow become part of who we are. Its loss revealed how much we invest in the surrounding landscape.

Then came the proposals, as proposals always do in these islands. One Russian architect offered a towering steel arch, complete with exhibition floors and a spiralling laser show. Each step would represent a thousand years of Maltese history. Online polls split sharply down the middle. Some longed to fill the gap on the horizon. Others insisted that nature should keep what nature took. Predictably, the debate faded before anyone reached a decision.

The sea, meanwhile, made its own quiet plans. The shattered blocks settled across the seabed at Dwejra, forming jagged caverns and tunnels. Divers christened the new site the Azure Boulders. Marine life moved into the cracks within months. What tourists mourned, the fish and the divers quietly celebrated. The Window had not really vanished at all. It had simply slipped beneath the surface to begin a second, hidden life.

There is, however, a happier PostScript a few kilometres up the coast. Near the village of Għarb stands another natural arch called Wied il-Mielaħ. Locals had long treated it as the Window's lesser cousin, quieter and far less photographed. After 2017, this overlooked arch suddenly inherited the limelight. Visitors now follow the valley road down to find it framing the open sea. Some swear it surpasses the original, with its oddly rectangular shape and wilder setting.

Wied il-Mielaħ rewards the patient traveller rather than the hurried tourist. A narrow staircase clings to the cliff, dropping almost to the waterline below. You hear the wind first, then notice the arch, then sense the sheer scale around you. Its limestone roof remains thick and healthy for now. Yet the same sea that took the Azure Window labours here too. One distant day, this arch will also bow to the waves.

There is a lesson in all this, though I promise not to focus on it today, on general election results day. Gozo teaches patience and humility better than any politician ever could. The Window stood for a few short centuries, thrilled millions, then returned to the sea that made it. Nothing here is truly permanent, not arches, not majorities, not the certainties we cling to on a Sunday morning. The island simply carries on, regardless.

The Azure Window reminds us we only borrow even our most beloved landmarks.So spare a thought today for that vanished arch at Dwejra. Picture Roger Chessell lowering his camera in disbelief as the spray cleared. Imagine the whoomph that echoed across the bay nine years ago. The Azure Window prompts us we only borrowed even our most beloved landmarks. We enjoy them briefly, photograph them endlessly, and eventually hand them back. The sea, like the electorate, always has the final word.