As you wait to be served

We have been frequent visitors to Gozo for more than 20 years and we usually take home a good supply of Maltese currency in notes as where we live these have to be ordered in advance. This has now turned out to have been a thoroughly bad policy. The Central Bank of Malta decreed - doubtless for its own convenience - that exchange into euros could only be effected at the Central Bank in Valletta after the end of February.

So a special trip to Valletta to change the old lira on May 15 - we pitched up at the Annex of the Central Bank at 10 to find a queue snaking out of the door, only one (!) cashier in action and a potential wait of up to two hours.

I was informed by a receptionist wearing the smug face of officialdom that I could speak to the manager if I wanted to. I did want to and she informed me that she was suffering from a "shortage of staff and that the Governor himself had just been down to assess the situation".

Nothing for it then but to stand in the queue for two hours or keep Gozo ferries solvent by coming back another day. Drinks trolleys pushed by Central Bank minions passed to and fro, presumably for the refreshment of further unseen minions, but during our long wait nobody so much as offered us a glass of water.

This, far more than all the empty ministerial cant about the importance of tourism to the economy, shows what one really thinks of foreign visitors. Surely it was not beyond the wit of the Central Bank to nominate at least one commercial bank across the islands to exchange on its behalf until the close of the first tourist season following conversion. Here in Luxembourg it is still possible to take old francs to a retail bank (as long as you are a customer of that bank) for exchange into euros. And we converted to the euro at the end of 2000!

The population of Luxembourg is about the same as that of the Maltese islands. I suggest that the whole process was insufficiently thought through and that the Governor of the Central Bank owes us a formal apology.