Nostalgia often involves reaching for a pair of rose-tinted spectacles: were the good old days really so much better?

As another tourist season ends and the business counts the costs of a second year of COVID-19, it is a time to reflect but, maybe, this time, via a smoke-tinted rear-view mirror.

Malta’s Chamber of Commerce has been doing just that, producing a 96-page review and I have a fiver here that says most of the sector’s ‘stake-holders’ won’t bother to read it, illustrated though it is with pie-charts and graphs.

One of the advantages of reaching great-grandparent age and, thank God, retaining most of one’s faculties, is that one can look back on the old days and make comparisons and judgements. It is, I feel, an entitlement. I have known Gozo for longer than most of its inhabitants. (I have known Malta, too, and the less said about that, the better. Except that I love its history  and think it’s a pity that the natives don’t seem to have learnt it, nor anything from it.)

But I remember Gozo because the moment I set foot on this rock it was love at first sight. I was still in my 20s, yet, I decided this was the place I wanted to live in and retire on.

The roads, in those days, were rubbish – and look at them now, after, maybe, half a century of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ – but it didn’t matter because there was hardly any traffic. The villages were quaint and remote from one another to the extent that most marriages were ‘within the village’. Some people in the south (Qala, Għajnsielem) had never been to the north (Marsalforn, Xlendi).

There was a luxury hotel, run by Italians, for Italians, who had been coming here since the Romans. It was self-sufficient and described as ‘an island within an island’ and I remember joking that it was because there was no road leading to it.

The overstated Grand Hotel was basically a b&b with doors that didn’t fit. And then there was St Patrick’s in Xlendi, which was run so casually that the last customer in the bar was expected to lock up when leaving.

I said then (and have probably repeated 100 times) that “people came to Gozo because nobody came to Gozo”.

After my discovery of the place, I went round the world six or seven times (more often, if you count going half-way round and back again). And I never found anywhere better, although one of Fiji’s 300 islands actually came quite close.

I was always drawn back to Gozo. Writers came here for the tranquillity. Artists came here for the light, the Xlendi sunsets and the golden glow reflected from the buildings. A bit primitive? Perhaps. Some houses didn’t even have running water until the 1960s.

But it was quaint, charming, unhurried and especially friendly to ex-pats who, the locals understood, could have chosen anywhere to live but had rightly chosen their island as the best place on earth.

They have made Gozo more like the place visitors want to escape from- Revel Barker

Now, one of the disadvantages of oldish age is needing to accept that change is inevitable.

So-called ‘developers’, who don’t understand the definition of their calling, call it ‘progress’. The more cliché-inclined describe it as ‘going to hell in a hand-cart’.

The writing was always on the wall. When Royal Clipper, the world’s biggest yacht, discharged its passengers in Mġarr for the day, taxi drivers were asking $50 (nobody had Maltese liri and it was that long ago) for a ride to Victoria. The same day in It-Tokk, a tourist, fairly obviously just off the boat, was charged $15 for a $5 straw hat.

“What does it matter,” the stallholder asked me: “They are not coming back.”

“Nor will they,” I told him, “if they realise they are being ripped off.”

But many day-trip tourists from Malta discovered the place and thought it was a preferable holiday destination and – believe it or not – the Maltese tumbled to it much later, only in the past 10 years, I’d guess. Its attraction was the same as for package-holidaymakers: it was different from Malta.

And what have they done? They have made it more like the place their visitors want to escape from. They have built flats that don’t sell, they’ve ignored what little they appreciated of their built heritage, they’ve blocked everybody’s priceless sea view and, in the last three years, we’ve hardly been able to move for tower cranes and Maltese traffic.

If fewer people come next year, it will be because they came here this year… and didn’t see anything about Gozo that was different from anywhere else.

The fact is that they will not actually have seen ‘Gozo’ at all.