The summer spike (or is it a wave? – metaphors matter) has left me uncharacteristically concerned about my health, or rather about the effect my health could have on that of others. The result is that, characteristically, I’m trying to socialise as little as possible.
Which didn’t stop me from meeting three people last week who told me they were soon off to their respective dachas in Sicily, France and Romania. That’s right, seaside villeġġjatura is a touch riffraffy these days. Why slum it out with the archbishop in St Paul’s when you can have the count as your neighbour in Transylvania?
I once found myself sitting next to a rich and important man on a flight to Switzerland. We weren’t in club class, so maybe he had decided to extend his holiday with a bit of social tourism in the getting there. In the event, he told me he was off to the family chalet in Chamonix. He wasn’t boasting or anything. To him, it was as matter-of-fact as talking about the mezzanin at Il-Veċċja.
The point is that there have always been a handful of super-rich Maltese with the means to own property in the romantic vacation spots of Europe: the French Riviera, the Alpine resorts and such. Nothing too extraordinary there, they were and are part of a cosmopolitan jet-setting elite for whom place matters less, and more. They are also not my topic here.
Nor are the kind, often the same people as the first, who own property as an uberinvestment (and perfect laundry, and all that) in cities like London and Paris. Again, and for all the glamour, they’re a fairly standard type. In my work I’ve met Indians who do lucrative if fickle business in places like West Africa. The richest of them all own apartments in London, the postcode serving as code in more ways than one.
The folks I’m interested in are the Maltese with a handsome income, but not super-rich, who buy bolthole property in Sicily or Tuscany or France. A large garden or land is considered a major asset, as is location in the countryside. While I don’t have statistics, I think we’re dealing with a flourishing breed.
We might ask why this is so. Certainly the notion of owning property abroad taps into the glamour of the Chamonix and St Tropez fantasy, but there’s also the opposite argument. Let’s call it the penny-per-acre dream: simply put, the pleasure of the bargain is as much part of the attraction as the fecundity of olive trees or the view of Etna.
There have always been a handful of super-rich Maltese with the means to own property in the romantic vacation spots of Europe
It’s a bit like eating Indian in the average restaurant in India. You will order 20 poppadums and six naans with your lunch, even if you’ve just had brunch and will only manage one of each. The pleasure’s in the deal: an acre of poppadum for two rupees is just too good to pass up, whether or not you’re actually hungry.
The three guilty parties I met this week all told me about how good it felt to be getting so much for so little. ‘Little’ here means a couple of hundred thousand euros, but we’re not talking poppadums. The buy’s a detached house in the countryside, with unhindered views and a fruit orchard.
Try getting that in Malta, and the impossibility of unhindered views or fruit orchards will only be part of your problem.
To use some annoying language, we are so conditioned by the market that the transaction becomes a thing in its own right. It’s rather like bargain hunting at a car boot sale. If it’s a bargain, you canny you’ve defeated the system – and you feel all the better for it. And, in a property-obsessed culture, a bargain in brick and mortar is a dream worth commuting to France or to anywhere else for.
Which brings me to the funny bit. The money for these bucolic idylls comes mostly from construction and property dealings in Malta. On the side, in many cases, but then everything is on the side in Malta – including the island itself, geologically speaking.
You couldn’t make it up. Here’s a bunch of people busy destroying (‘developing’, we’re told) their immediate habitat, and using the dividends to buy the right habitat elsewhere. It’s a vicious cycle, too, because the more you destroy the greater your urge to get away from it, which in turn makes you destroy some more to fund the excursion.
Perhaps most importantly, where does it leave the rest of us? At St Paul’s, probably, breathing in dust and wondering if the madness was really all that necessary.