Cranes, pains and automobiles

In the 1980s, when water was a scarcity, bowsers were like gold dust and jerrycans were ‘in’; when we’d forage and fill our sinks, bidets and baths up with water every time we chanced upon some inside our faucets, regardless of whether we needed or wanted a wash, my mother was out to supper and trusted herself to tell the rest of the table about the acute water shortage that pervaded Sliema, which was always the hardest hit and invariably seemed to get the worst water deal.

I’m not sure what sort of response or reaction my mother expected, but I imagine she thought it might elicit some empathy or possibly be a conversation catalyst of sorts. A woman who was present, piped up and very unsympathetically told her that although water may have been scarce in Sliema, soap certainly wasn’t.

The entire conversation would have taken place in Maltese, where ‘soap’ translates as something other than the agent used for washing or cleaning. My mother, hardly soapy at the best of times and not normally lost for words, was stumped and didn’t retaliate or say another word. In the presence of downright ill-mannered rancour, politeness and elegance are usually one’s most effective and powerful tool.

Fast forward 30 years and I still live here, only this time I’m thinking it could really use a bucketload of that soap, and I find myself wondering how Sliema still gets the rawest deal. How time and again, we always manage to bag first prize for ‘armpit of the nation’.

It’s too hot to think. And then there’s the Metropole hotel which is being knocked down next door, which has turned ‘thinking’ into a word which is destined to exist only between inverted commas. When you wake up to that mind-penetrating jigging sound every single day of the week, including Saturday, distraction-free thinking becomes a luxury, especially when you live in my neck of Sliema. The tower cranes which have taken up permanent residency, the green tatty mesh, the flotilla of heavy dump trucks, haulers and cement mixers are just about everywhere.

With us, it starts way at the bottom with the new Lombard restoration project and makes its way, slowly but surely, up. In Dingli Street alone, there are five buildings where construction is underway. Cranes don’t even come and go anymore. They are permanent structures, wedged between their own not-so-little stone enclaves and can sit there for years.

We had one at the bottom of Howard Street for four, maybe even five years, blocking access to Tower Road. And every so often, it makes a little comeback and I think ‘here we (don’t) go again’.

Creche Street has followed suit . It has its very own live-in crane which has gathered its own share of dust, debris, shattered glass and litter, quite apart from snatching up a multitude of valuable parking spaces.

I could go on and on, take you through every single street, give you the construction skinny, quoting chapter and verse, but it would be as exciting as reading The Maze before bed, so I won’t go down any of those roads.

You see, the thing about these building sites is that their nuisance value is not just about the noise, dust, and general ugliness they generate. It goes way beyond. They compromise parking because they occupy a lot of surface area.

And even when they aren’t physically taking up the spaces, parking in close proximity is still an impossibility unless you are content to park under ominous boulders suspended in mid-air, or otherwise suffer the thick dust, the shards and scraps of glass, stone and paint that are an inevitable consequence.

Plus they’re psychologically draining. Being continuously faced with the din, the dirt, the concrete slabs overhead on a daily basis is a strain which takes its toll in ways you wouldn’t even imagine.

Life just isn’t good in Sliema and hasn’t been for a long while. It’s an absolute aesthetic mess which has progressively led to a steady decline in the quality of lives of the people who live there, verging on a health hazard.

We are truly the forgotten land, and every time I catch sight of a parking ticket being slapped onto someone’s windscreen, I find myself possessed by a maddening desire to spoil for a fight with the warden, who is invariably badly parked him or herself.

There should be laws against doing that. How are we expected to nip into supermarkets, newsagents or to realistically carry heavy shopping into our homes, when our streets have been hijacked by the construction behemoth?

And why are we treated like visitors in our own hometowns, when the Valletta folks clearly aren’t? Valletta gets ‘greener’ every time I visit, and that isn’t a reference to the trees. Resident parking rules. Everyone else is taxed upon entry.

I found myself at a Sliema residents’ meeting two months ago, with a couple of hundred other people who were clearly as fed up as me. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have gone, because I find these events an utter waste of time.

The air-conditioning never works, people talk over one other, and you leave feeling angrier than when you arrived. Knowing that others are as irritated as I am but are equally impotent to effect change, has the strangest effect of making me even more frustrated.

And parking isn’t even the worst of our problems. It’s the roads and the pavements – those are the worst offenders.

Oh, and the garbage. Recently our local council issued a circular, designating specific days and times when garbage can be disposed of. I was aghast to see everyone’s garbage outside on both Wednesday and Friday, supposedly the ‘garbage ‘sabbath.

I resisted the temptation to join in, so now while my garbage lives at home, everyone’s sits outside all day long and Sliema has taken ‘living in a garbage dump‘ up a couple of notches. Oh for some of that soap!

michelaspiteri@gmail.com