As someone whose parents both hail from the sister island and who would go to visit their parents every single weekend without fail while dragging us with them, I was intimately familiar with the Gozo ferries. Seemingly passed down from Gozitan generation to generation, from infancy you would start to feel anxiety in the last stretch of the road before you boarded the ferry.

The inexplicable fear of arriving too late or, worse still, being the only car left behind, permeated the whole experience of getting to and from Gozo and stayed with me as I got older. Even though the wait for the next trip was only usually around 45 minutes, it would literally feel like an eternity. Who would have told me that this issue would eventually become the least of my worries?

I remember the first time I encountered a big queue to get to Gozo. We went up for Santa Marija and there were dozens of cars both to get onto the boat and to come back the day after.

It was to be expected though at that time of year. But, then, as the years rolled by, there started to be a car clog at every significant event. The carnival period, for example, became particularly bad in my late teens. Now, almost 20 years later, almost every weekend has become a nightmare for crossers.

Last Sunday, it got so bad that the Gozo Channel chairman appealed to the public to avoid crossing between Malta and Gozo on Sundays between 5 and 8pm. Apparently, the latest delays are down to the company being one ship down thanks to the MV Nikolaos having maintenance being carried out on it.

Now, while the MV Nikolaos currently being out of order is obviously not helping the situation, the truth is that the situation was precarious even when my least favourite ferry was being packed to its rafters with cars. The fact that it’s currently defunct doesn’t really explain how and why I spent hours and hours queueing to cross over to visit family last year and even more time trying to get back.

We scapegoat and blame a cog in the machine for it not working, without addressing the fact that the machine is simply no longer fit for purpose- Anna Marie Galea

As has become customary of our people, we scapegoat and blame a cog in the machine for it not working, without addressing the fact that the machine is simply no longer fit for purpose.

While the cost of living continues to climb, leaving people less able to go overseas, and the bigger island continues to become uglier and less peaceful, more and more people will flock to Gozo for what is left of its fresh air and quiet. And since the construction, commotion and traffic aren’t slowing down, we are just going to have to assume that people are going to keep going to Gozo till it gets similarly ruined. This means that we either need to purchase more boats and offer a shuttle service (we certainly seem to have the manpower for this from the number of workers I have seen guiding cars onto the vessel) or perhaps offer cheaper tickets outside of peak hours to incentivise people to pick different times to travel.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was just one thing that worked properly in this country?