Every day life in 'British' Malta

Abstract

Is the British connection in Malta becoming increasingly distant and dated? Was our 'Englishness' never much more than a varnish? I was recently sitting at a water-front restaurant table by the Msida Yacht Marina with an old time friend who had repatriated after twenty years in England. The warm breeze, the shimmering sea, the leisurely pace, all somehow evoked a colonial atmosphere, or at least an inkling of it: the sort of 'times past' feeling still transmitted by hotels like Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border or at the Raffles in Singapore, or indeed by the new golf club gazebo at the Marsa. We had both been overseas, he longer than I; but we had gravitated back to a common point of origin: what a flimsy school text-book in the 1950s used to call 'Malta, Our Island Home'. 'So how do you spend your time here?' he asked, as the wine was being served. 'What do you do usually?' Good Lord! How did you live? What did you do? How were you organising your time? My diary was on the table. 'How do you like the fish?' I replied: 'I think it's fresh'. Turn these questions in your head, and try to begin consciously and comprehensively to describe your 'every day life', wherever and whatever that may be. It is a very tall order, even if you had to do it now and for yourself alone, let alone doing that for different times of days of the week, of months, years, decades, generations, for a whole community or society.