The long and winding road

Who does not remember this glorious Beatles song, or, to be correct, pop ballad? An immortal from the moment it was recorded in January 1969, this song and many like it can now be heard, without undue interruption on this wonderful new radio station called Malta's Magic, 91.7 FM. With the slogan "more music, less talk", the frequency has taken Malta by storm and everywhere I go the "sounds" are the same. I have even abandoned my instalments of Classic FM on 103.7 mostly because I am very annoyed with the UK station itself for disallowing anyone not resident in the UK to tune in via PC. Effortlessly listening to soothing light music that jogs a host of lovely memories is far preferable when one is out and about playing vehicular Snakes and Ladders.

I really do hope that Malta's Magic will keep its word and remain as is, less talk and more music, playing all the most gorgeous songs written and composed from the 1960s to the present day.

I am convinced that this station was set up purposely to soothe our frayed and jangled nerves while we drive, or rather, queue, bumper to bumper, in the daily traffic jams that clog our roads and streets. The unearthly music of 10CC will keep our minds off homicide as we drive up a street and discover that we have to reverse all the way back because of some crane. Dire Straits with its twangs and riveting lyrics will calm us as we slowly navigate our cars over those insidious black and yellow sleeping policemen that increase and multiply alarmingly as their human counterparts disappear. As for the bumps and holes, it takes all the ingenuity of Supertramp, Christina Aguilera and Sting to keep us from losing it completely and totally as we rattle and clank our poor cars in yet another mini-ditch and play Dodge the Pothole!

For some months the St Paul's Bay Bypass has been undergoing major surgery. We always knew that there was something radically wrong with it simply because driving on certain stretches of it made one feel rather seasick. Now it is almost completely closed; only one lane is available to a snake of cars going from Burmarrad to Xemxija.

Sunday, October 29 was the first day when we mercifully reverted to normal time and many people went out for picnics, walks and drives. The traffic back was horrendous, with the mother of all traffic jams inching its way amidst a cloud of exhaust fumes from Mellieha to the Coast Road with cars desperately trying to escape through the backways creating subsidiary jams through Mizieb, Manikata, San Martin and Bingemma, the inhabitants of which, unused to such traffic oozing slowly past them, came out to watch us with dropped jaws! It was crazy. An hour and a half after doubling back near the Mellieha sanctuary, we finally made it home in a state of collapse after we had practically circumnavigated three quarters of the island.

While I fully agree that road works are necessary I cannot but deplore two major flaws, the first being lack of planning and the second the inordinate amount of time required to complete a project. Only yesterday there was a team working on the busiest stretch of the Regional Road. In time-honoured fashion, there was but one man working with another two telling him what to do. Another three were watching from the side of the road as we crawled down; one was scratching his armpits, the other his tummy and the other his head. Some men in yellow waistcoats were purposefully making their way up towards the hot action but nobody else seemed to be the least bit perturbed!

Driving along the one lane of the St Paul's Bay Bypass on Saturday morning there was but one lone worker in a tractor doing whatever he could do. He, poor chap, had neither someone to tell him what to do, nor an audience of scratchers to encourage him in his endeavours!

Now the Regional Road Bridge is coming down. Be sure there will be songs, ballads and rhymes about it in future just like when London Bridge came down centuries ago. They say the project will last three years. The Great Pyramid which has enough stone blocks to encircle France was built in relatively less time!

All this is totally unacceptable. Here we are moaning about Product Malta and our declining tourist figures with our roads looking like bomb sites and with three quarters of Malta's drivers suffering of severe breakdowns or acute road rage! If there are not enough workers to complete a project in reasonable time more must be found. The illegal immigrants can be put to work along with the inmates of Palazzo Kordin too if necessary; but the jobs must be done in record time without dragging. As was done some years ago in Msida, there must be shifts working round the clock and over weekends.

In a country like ours, where the amount of cars per capita is 70 per cent, mostly because it is impossible to rely on public transport, the maintenance and organisation of roads is of paramount importance. The greatest civilisations have thrived because of the efficiency of their roads. Think of the Roman Empire without the Appian and Aurelian ways and the Byzantine Empire without the Egnatian. Think of the priorities that have contributed to the success of every memorable ruler in history since Romulus and you will find that it was based on mobility and openness, translated as the ability to arrive quickly and painlessly from one destination to another, thus boosting trade, cultural exchange and growth.

We are a sea-locked island with far too many physical and psychological drawbacks that impede proper cultural and economic growth as it is. As if that were not bad enough we also have difficulty in getting from one place to another within our own confines, which is unacceptable. Enervation, frustration and road rage will be the order of day once the vital artery of the Regional Road is shut off and the heavy traffic that uses it will be diverted through secondary roads that, more often than not, have been blocked up because of some building project or some drainage replacement. With just Malta's Magic to soothe our fraying nerves as our communication system reduces Hampton Court Maze to insignificance, I wonder how long the project will really last before it becomes necessary to install cable cars and helicopters to get from place to place without getting a mental breakdown.