Develop. An interesting word, meaning to grow or cause to grow and become more mature, or advanced… to evolve.

The word comes, of course, from Latin; the velop bit is from envelop; the de means undo: put together it originally meant to unfold.

Development: more interesting. In 1750s English it meant ‘a gradual unfolding, a full working out or disclosure of details’; by the 1790s it included a sense of ‘advancement’; by 1820 it meant ‘cultivation’ and ‘improvement’ (in American English, ‘betterment’).

Passionate supporter of freedom of speech and expression though I am, I would like to see both words banned. If only on Gozo. This wretched little island has had all the ‘development’ it can stand and then some.

The word nowadays means something quite different – different, certainly from betterment or improvement. Something quite scary.

It means poring over a map until you find a green bit and then filling the space with something that looks as though it had been designed by a Lego mechanic on meth. The inventor of wooden pallets for fork-lift trucks had a better eye for beauty.

A couple of years ago I was told by somebody who knew somebody who had made a rough count that there were, by then, more shell apartments on Gozo than there were people. (I don’t think it was a scientific survey but it looked about right.) So, who are all these buildings for?

They are not for the naturally increasing population of school-leavers and young families because we are regularly told – by the people who could, at the drop of a hat, provide work for them – that there are not enough jobs to keep people on the island. They are not for tourists because they are cramped, have no view, and no pool. They surely cannot be for the fat-cat weekenders from our sister island who (one would, at least, like to imagine) want somewhere half-decent to show off their wealth. And, although many of them may look like it, nor can they be for student accommodation because another constant reminder is that students need to cross the channel on a daily basis because internet-savvy Malta hasn’t yet got its head round distance learning (or, rather, distance teaching).

The word nowadays means something quite different… something quite scary

But that’s the Maltese way, isn’t it? Supply the teachers and students with laptops but don’t teach the teachers how to teach with them, nor the students how to use them to learn.

In the same fashion, the Gozitan landowner builds because he can afford the bricks, not because he has a vision of his flats being occupied. If he gets planning permission, he builds before the government changes (unlikely) or before the permission expires (normally five years).

After all, his money is making nothing in the bank; he might as well spend it on bricks and mortar that he can see and know that it can only improve in monetary worth, even if the end game will be to sell it to somebody who can demolish it and build something worthwhile on the footprint.

So the design is not so much “drawn on the back of a fag packet”, as based on a fag packet. Architecture, which should complement the local area, or, at least, not detract from it, is not a factor. And if it blocks a neighbour’s view of the sea, that’s just tough luck for him.

All this ‘spec’ (as in speculative) building has a knock-on effect. Firstly – because this is what matters above all to Malta’s wealth – it uglifies the island (remember when people used to describe Gozo as being “clean and green – and quiet”?) Now we have tower cranes everywhere you look, along with noise and dust in the air from stone-cutting. We have less green, less clean and less quiet by the day.

This isn’t what Gozo is supposedly about. The beauty of it – once – was that it was unbuilt. People came here because nobody came here. Some were even prepared to pay top dollar to holiday on a Mediterranean island that had no tourists.

Many authors – from Nicholas Monsarrat (The Cruel Sea) to A. J. Quinnell, the pseudonymous author of Man On Fire – came to the island because it was a place in which one could write and even achieve inspiration. Gozo literally became a muse for both men.

It was, to put it even more plainly, different from Benidorm.

Secondly, Gozo has gone downhill so quickly in the past few years that many ex-pats – who make up a sizeable minority of the resident population and contribute considerably more than their share to the island economy – are starting to look elsewhere.

Even some of those returned native Gozitans who made their money abroad (the ones who have not started building on their father’s allotment, nor sold nannu’s grand house for conversion into a ‘bijoux’ hotel) are wondering, aloud, whether they made the right decision in coming home.

In the old days, Malta used to advertise itself without ever mentioning Gozo but showing photos of Ramla and the Azure Window (Ha!) because they were the most scenic in the archipelago. Now, though, they refer to Malta and Gozo together and, why not, because there’s little to choose between them.

But they have also started to mention Comino. A frightening sign that it’s the next place for the D-word.