The revaluation of Valletta as a heritage site is very much about its grand period buildings, their contents (lorded over by two Caravaggios), and what one might call the manufactured authenticity of the city’s streets. The restored façades, the lava paving, and the new entrance are among the more recognisable faces of the state of the art.

All said, a fairly happy state. Valletta today is an infinitely smarter and more self-confident place than the one I remember as a child. Still, there is one thing which is as much overlooked as it is a crucial part of people’s lived experience of the city.

It’s the shops, stupid. It may be that I was particularly philistine, or perhaps I was just too young. Fact is I don’t really remember feeling bad about the crumbling baroque façades, the tarmac, or the lack of signposting. Rather, it’s the shops I related to the most. They provided a good part of our bearings and were an endless source of visual fascination, even as the Caravaggios oxidised away in their damp and dilapidated home.

Not surprisingly, most of the shops I knew and loved as a child are now gone. The few survivors owe their rescue to the geography of retail in Valletta. The market potential of the main shopping streets makes it profitable for shopkeepers there to sink their money in renovation and replacement. Happily, I think, the zeal peters out the farther away one moves from the central axis.

Which means that the shop I spent most time hanging about in front of as a child is still there. It’s also completely unchanged, to the extent that it’s beginning to look distinctly unreal in a ghost-of-city’s-past sort of way.

‘John Camilleri – Fishing Tackle’ sits on the corner between St John’s and Strait streets. Not only is the shop window still painted the same colour as it was 30 years ago, it displays exactly the same wares; by ‘exactly’ I mean down to the basket (qoffa) that hangs over the doorway, and the smallest box of swivels.

Not that the owners can’t be bothered – on the contrary, the place looks very neat and fresh. It’s just that their attitude seems to be that if things are to stay as they are, things have to do just that. I could stand in front of that shop window and feel like a tinpot Dorian Gray for the rest of my life, without the dire consequences.

But elixirs were not the reason I stood outside John Camilleri’s the other day. Fishing tackle was. I’ve been cured of fishing since I was 15 and have no intention to relapse. But there was something I needed for my snorkelling and I found myself looking at row upon row and stacks of little boxes, lures, rods, reels, and other stuff I never knew existed.

That’s because I wasn’t in Valletta at all. Rather, I was in a kind of fishing-tackle grand bazaar in Fgura (Mister Fish, if my memory serves me right).

Hundreds of hours misspent loitering at a street corner hadn’t prepared me for this. John Camilleri’s sold (sells, I suppose) hearty things like lenza (twine), xlief (fishing line), ċomb (sinkers) and snanar (hooks). A very good day might get you a three-pronged hook (kulpara) for octopus or a lure for squid. That was it, and the fish bit and the world was nice and simple.

I’m not sure it’s still possible to buy rods made of lengths of bamboo with shellacked red twine around the ends to prevent them from splintering. It was the same contraption used by Sampei-Ragazzo Pescatore, an Italian-dubbed Japanese anime character and one of our boyhood heroes.

In all other ways our fishing was a fairly local affair that depended on local knowledge. A tourist who tried their luck had little chance of getting the fish to bite. Bait, for example, had to be procured. The small shrimps found in rockpools and the woodlouse-like animals (dud) that lived on rocky shores were deemed excellent deceptions, but they were hard to get and one often spent more time chasing after them than actually fishing.

Our lines (xolfa) we made ourselves and came in two types – ‘taż-żewġ’, used for surface-feeding fish, and ‘tal-qiegħ’, intended for deeper water. I remember borrowing books from the library and wondering what booms were, or whether the thousand different lures were creatures of the authors’ imagination. Certainly John Camilleri’s, with its simple white cardboard boxes, provided no answers.

Not surprisingly, most of the shops I knew and loved as a child are now gone

Which brings me to the Fgura über-shop. It strikes me that shore fishing has changed completely in the last couple of decades. Take lures. Today’s hobbyists have hundreds to choose from. Each comes with its own recommended rod type (in hi-tech carbon, not bamboo) and some even with their own user guide on DVD. It turns out our fish are not as Maltese as we once thought. They understand the language of a DVD produced in Italy, or the US.

Trolling with lures from shore is a fairly recent innovation. The same can be said of the bewildering range of rods, reels, sinkers, fluorescent booms, and so on.

Bait, too, has changed. While it is still possible to buy locally-procured worms (ħniex) at eye-watering prices of up to €50 for a single substantial specimen, many anglers seem to go for the bright red things that come pre-packed in boxes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out they first saw the light in China.

It’s not that there are more fish to catch. It’s more a matter of fishing having swallowed the lure of consumerism. Never mind if at the end of the day you end up with three slim bogue (vopi) and Mr Lilliput Cuttlefish in your bucket. What matters is that you will first have spent two hours sifting through stacks of wares at Mister Fish. That, and the extra points on your loyalty card.

I’ve just finished reading Tony Taylor’s Fishing the River of Time (2013). It’s a lovely little book written by an old hand who first fished the great salmon rivers of Vancouver Island in 1968. Forty years later at 80-something, Taylor took his grandson to the same place.

Fishing in Canada had by that time gone all carbon and lightweight and hi-tech. Only the Taylors stuck to the old ways and ended up with one fish to show for two weeks of fishing. Which was about the average for the rest of the crowd, carbon and all.

I live in the hope that somewhere out there there is still a fish that might be tempted with shrimps caught from a rockpool, and hooks bought at John Camilleri – Fishing Tackle.

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