In olden days, when the cheapest way to get here was to fly Air Malta, your tickets came in the post with a little booklet, helpfully explaining what to expect when you got here.
I must have had dozens of them but I have searched and been unable to find one. So, what follows is from memory, although somebody will have kept one and will be able to correct me.
If we, visiting tourists, were thinking of bringing any electrical equipment, we were usefully told that Malta, nowadays (this was 40-odd years ago) used square three-pin sockets, like the UK, although if you bought anything here, it came with a round, two-pin plug.
And if you were female and planning to sunbathe topless on the beach, you had booked flights to the wrong country.
Although the information was governmental, it contained a joke. Officially, it said, we drive on the left, although, it said, we actually prefer to drive on the shady side of the road. Ha-ha. It was a clue to the way the Maltese drove, which was any side they liked, although mostly down the middle.
But what prompted this memory was reading concerns about Comino this year, after the debacle that was last year.
The main attraction of the island was, of course, that there were no people on it. True, there was a hotel, so discreetly built that you couldn’t even see it from Gozo but guests stayed within the compound, except when taking leisurely strolls through the gorse. Apart from a single Land Rover, required for agricultural use, no motor vehicles were permitted on the island.
Who allowed motorised kiosks to arrive on Comino?- Revel Barker
Now, this is where the memory fades a bit. I am fairly sure that the booklet said that camping, camper vans and caravans were not allowed – anywhere. Unless I misread it, or misremember it, it meant anywhere on the Maltese islands. But now there is a campsite, in Santa Marija Bay of all places.
So, if I remember it correctly, when did these rules change, and who changed them, and why? Who allowed motorised kiosks to arrive on Comino (and how did they get there?) There was a ‘magisterial inquiry’ into how (and why) a road suddenly appeared on the island – nobody had noticed it being laid. What was the result of the inquiry?
Since the Maltese (south islanders) discovered the jewel on their doorstep about 20 years ago, Gozo has gone rapidly downhill as weekenders have endeavoured – like colonisers everywhere – to make the green, clean and pleasant island more like the overbuilt, treeless, grubby shambles of the place that they live on.
Well, yes, of course, times change. Even if the driving and the plugs don’t.
We no longer travel Air Malta, we don’t get our airline tickets in the post and so we don’t get a little booklet.
It would be different reading, nowadays. For example, it might say that the skyline of Gozo can be recognised by the preponderance of tower cranes, sometimes 22 of them in one village. And you can identify Malta by the grey-purple cloud of pollution hanging above it.
On calm days in Gozo (heaven knows what it must be like in the other place), it may be impossible to sunbathe on your balcony because the air is full of noxious exhaust fumes. I mean that literally: people retreat indoors, closing doors and windows behind them.
On windy days you may be pelted by tiny bits of coarse dust from stonecutting.
In other words, the booklet needs revisiting and rewriting. There may be money to be made from it if the publishers include advertising (the original was ad-free). Tattoo parlours should advertise in it.
Most of the tourists that Malta attracts these days love colourful tatts – not the simple anchors that once identified sailors who had got lathered in the Far East, but full body (or at least full-leg or full-arm), with climbing rose trees which may attract greenfly to their bodies. Why roses? Oh, because they are English, of course.
Merħba. Enjoy your holiday. Drive in the shade.
Revel Barker is a former Fleet Street reporter and a long-term resident of Gozo.