An anthropologist once asked Swedish people what was the first thing they did when they got back home after a long trip abroad. It turned out that the most popular choice was for them to drink a glass of Swedish milk. The taste, coupled with all the terroir connotations (milk enjoys a special cultural aura in many northern countries), served to reconnect them to the familiar.

Many readers will know the feeling. A hopelessly-unscientific survey I cooked up to research this column showed that it is common for Maltese people to buy a couple of pastizzi on their way home from the airport, and that more powerful homecomings might be garnished with Twistees and washed down with Kinnie.

Except there is one thing that reconnects us better than the flakiest pastizzi ever could. The side benefits are that it is considerably lower in calories, and that it kicks off well before landing if one flies Air Malta. That something is a copy of the Times of Malta or, if the timing is especially auspicious, The Sunday Times of Malta.

A few caveats are in order. First, I’ve a bias to declare: I’m loyal to the people who have been optimistic enough to spare me a corner of their newspaper for the past eight years. Second, I shall say nothing about the serious journalistic side of the Times of Malta. It’s a birthday party after all, and solemnity would spoil the occasion. Third, what follows is my idiosyncratic take on an institution that goes well beyond my impressions.

The closest I got to understanding what the Times of Malta is about was when I lived in India. Equally rooted in notions of a colonial past when everything was valiant and proper, The Times of India made the perfect candidate for me to fall in love with. I bought and read it religiously, and once even wrote a guest column on mobile phones, then a novelty in that country.

The colonial legacy sees to it that the Times of Malta comes in a prestige language. Doubly so, in fact, since English is both the currency of the valiant and proper Empire on which, in a sense, the sun hasn’t entirely set yet, and, more recently, the lingua franca of the cosmopolitan middle class.

That has made the Times of Malta the natural choice of the aspirational ranks. In Malta, and by a series of ironic twists that only a paid-up anorak would discuss in a column, the legacy means a certain special relationship with the Nationalist Party. Black Monday, and the (usually apocryphal) stories of the technique of folding your newspaper in such a way as to avoid getting your face smashed in by laburisti, certainly helped.

In Swieqi, to walk out of the shop holding the Times of Malta is the natural thing to do. In Cospicua, among many other places, it’s a performance of allegiance

In this case, the sun is still very much high in the sky. I usually buy my Sunday copy at my local newsagent in Cospicua, but there was a long phase during which my shopping moved to Swieqi. I found I could measure the class and political moorings of the Times of Malta just by looking at the height of the stacks on the counters.

There’s more. In Swieqi, to walk out of the shop holding the Times of Malta is the natural thing to do. In Cospicua, among many other places, it’s a performance of allegiance. Clearly, thousands of laburisti read and buy the Times of Malta, but that’s hardly the point.

There are other things that the Maltese and Indian cousins share. Any newspaper with a sense of editorial direction will reflect aspirations, but it will also set up its undesirables. There is an uncanny resemblance between the Indian and Maltese undesirables.

The typical issue of The Times of India is also a commentary on the ways in which India is thought to be backwards. The usual suspects include noise, encroachment on public space, hawkers whose carts occupy the streets, lack of public hygiene and cleanliness, and so on.

Readers will get my drift but, just in case, the words ‘hunters’, ‘boathouses’, ‘hawkers’ (whose carts occupy the streets), and ‘litter’, should help.

The best clues are usually in the Letters to the Editor pages. I think it was Mr Pooter (he of the ‘nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement’) who once resolved to “write to the Telegraph for the purpose of proposing that cabs should be driven only by men under government control”.

Pooter’s friend, a Mr Cummings, preferred the social pages in the Bicycle News. He’d have loved the pages of congratulatory messages to graduates that make it to The Sunday Times of Malta every autumn, or the long lists of results of music exams (Grade I Violin Pass: So-and-So, Grade 5 Piano Distinction Such-and-Such).

That’s because The Sunday Times of Malta (less so the daily) is also a newsletter. It’s one of the surest ways of knowing who’s who and who’s doing what (and possibly who) in the parish, or in certain parish circles. Which is another reason why it beats the pastizzi homecoming hands down.

Someone once wrote (in The Sunday Times of Malta, of course) that The Sunday Times of Malta is also Malta’s leading academic journal. It may be the only newspaper in the world in which gentlemen historians write technical tomes, complete with lists of references, on a Maltese sailor on the Pinta who may after all have been the first to sight land on that fateful voyage.

Let us then raise a toast to that grand bazaar of life in Malta. May the Times of Malta last at least another 80, if not 1,000. My Sunday mornings wouldn’t be complete without it, and for once I know I speak for the very many.

mafalzon@hotmail.com