There are a few advantages to being born into a family where you have had the opportunity to mix with different people regardless of background, culture, or creed: it gives you perspective. It also gives you the advantage of taking part in worlds which are dissimilar to yours and perhaps understanding people better. This shouldn’t be uncommon in the age we are living in, but it is.
Coming back to Malta from the UK at a young age, I found grown men and women bewildered by the fact that my parents were Gozitan but that I either spoke English or Gozitan and nothing in-between. At the private school I used to attend, some of the less lovely children took it upon themselves to make it an issue, and though it never bothered me, it did speak of the insularity and ignorance in which many Maltese, from self-professed educated families, are raised.
Outside, in the real world, people would blatantly ask me to speak in Maltese when it was obvious that I was more comfortable expressing myself in English and when they clearly could understand me. I felt that I had to justify my existence by explaining that I had lived abroad; I would always get the same sigh of relief, and the person would instantly soften.
It was very confusing to me to see people so ready to draw lines in the sand between me and them based on something which I deemed to be so small. But then we take any opportunity to create an “us and them” situation in Malta because it matters to us socially to be considered to be special on an island where almost everyone’s family was poor and worked the lands three or four generations ago.
People are so hellbent on divorcing themselves from their roots that they’ve taken to romanticising farm life, hanging rusty ploughs on their farmhouse walls, and, conversely, building over any bit of greenery as vigorously as all the hours of toil their great-grandparents put into nurturing that same land.
The past is victim to the metaphorical and literal steamroller; nature has no value other than to be exploited. There is no budget for the farming sector; we will it to disappear.
I truly look forward to seeing the fruit of their findings and am even more excited about getting to a point when someone doesn’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s champagne- Anna Marie Galea
Even when it comes to bird trapping, we are modernising. Men are no longer just imprisoning birds because they feel the inert need to dominate the defenceless; no, what they are apparently doing is conducting research. When one of our MEPs wished trappers a happy research season this week, I almost fell out of my chair. It’s truly one thing to support such an archaic “sport”, but to dress it up as something which literally everyone on the island knows it isn’t is another.
I don’t know how many trappers he knows, but I’ve met a few, and I’ve yet to see one who would be willing to submit their findings (whatever these findings are meant to be) to the Royal Ornithological Society.
I truly look forward to seeing the fruit of their findings and am even more excited about getting to a point when someone doesn’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s champagne. I’m sure that the only reason half the country doesn’t resent being made a fool of so publicly is because they probably think they’re being clever and giving the finger to Brussels.
May your coffees all be as strong as our researchers’ Bunsen burners.