Malta’s hotel entrepreneurs and construction developers are never satisfied with their achievements. As soon as they finish one project, they start planning more projects in Malta or abroad.

The developers make sure that the next project is more ‘mega’ than the one before it. And the hoteliers are not content with owning two or three hotels in Malta – they want to own six more abroad!

When I read about the endless schemes of these restless and ambitious men, I’m reminded of an observation by the 16th century historian Francesco Guicciardini: “It is a remarkable fact that we all must die, and yet we all live as if we were to live forever.”

I also recall an episode in Henry Fieldings’ Tom Jones. In this novel, a middle-aged army captain marries, for money, the sister of Mr Allworthy, a wealthy country squire. The captain has big plans for the estate when he inherits it.

One summer evening, he goes for a walk in his garden. “Just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by Mr Allworthy’s death, he himself died of an apoplexy.

“He took, therefore, measure of that proportion of soil which was now become adequate to all his future purposes, and he lay dead on the ground, a great (though not a living) example of the truth of the observation of Horace: ‘You provide the noblest materials for building, when a pickaxe and a spade are only necessary; and build houses of five hundred by a hundred feet, forgetting that of six by two’.”