In the 1990s the telecom Alcatel ran an advert that showed a map of the world in a series of stages. The series summed up the history of information technology, as a result of which the world had got smaller and smaller. The smallest of all was, of course, the then-present. Telecoms generally, and Alcatel in particular, had shrunk distance to the point of insignificance.

The ad was a take on an old idea. “Here, time becomes space,” Gurnemanz tells Parsifal in the eponymous opera. In theory, distance is a measurable length between two points on a map. In practice, it is the experience of getting there, of which time is a key ingredient.

What that means is that, in the age of air travel, London is effectively closer to Malta than Lampedusa. The first is over 2,000 kilometres away, the second not quite 200. But it takes three hours to get to London and the best part of a day to get to Lampedusa.

I know someone from the hamlet of Tas-Santi near Mġarr who has been to Valletta five or six times in her entire 80 years. She has also been to Lourdes and to Melbourne, but that’s another matter. She is not unique. On the contrary, she is typical of the first age of Malta. Let’s call it the Age of Locality.

Admittedly something of a simplification, the Age of Locality lasted roughly until the 1950s. The island may have been small, but it still took many hours to cross on foot and a couple by cart or carriage. The result was that most people lived in localities.

Take work. A good chunk of the population lived within easy walking distance from where they worked. Trades were plied from casa-bottega-type home workshops or by people doing the local village rounds. Farmers walked or rode animals to their fields. The thousands of men who worked at the Admiralty dockyard lived for the most part in the crowded harbour cities.

The geography of leisure was even more telling. Mnarja was one of those rare occasions when country people from all over Malta made the trek to Buskett. San Girgor was another, as were the sporadic pilgrimages to places like the Mellieħa sanctuary.

The Age of Mobility contained the seeds of its own destruction. The impossibility of moving fast in a fast-moving vehicle is a cruel paradox brought about by too many vehicles

For obvious reasons, marriage usually involved people from the same locality – the same geographical area in Malta, if not the same town or village. That’s because for men, and especially for women, interaction was geographically restricted.

I did warn against over-simplification. Certainly itinerant traders were not at all uncommon, and there were dockyard workers who commuted many hours each way every day. Marriage, too, could be unpredictable: in the 17th century, a good percentage of young people who lived in the harbour towns took French or Italian spouses, among other nationalities.

But this is a case where the exceptions prove the rule. Examples of mobility notwithstanding, I still think it’s accurate to describe an Age of Locality.

It all changed when cars became widely affordable in the post-War decades. Suddenly, locality was expanded to mean the whole island. The short time it took to drive across the country effectively shrank distances and made them irrelevant. For the first time, locality effectively meant Malta.

The Age of Mobility brought with it a host of strange creatures. Schools and supermarkets sprang up in the middle of nowhere, in some cases many miles away from the nearest homes. Daily shopping went double-barrelled and added ‘convenience’, even as double-parking became a standard fixture of buying a carton of milk.

Leisure, too, outgrew its exoskeleton. People thought nothing of driving to Golden Bay for an hour’s swim, or to Buskett to read the papers. Pilgrimages to the Mellieħa Sanctuary and such survived, but did away with all the (religious, not least) meaning of the getting-there.

The Age of Locality became a memory. The other day I overheard a conversation between three women who as children had been neighbours in Bormla but who now lived elsewhere. They reminisced about the local shops of their childhood, and about a time when the school bell told pupils when to leave home for school.

So far so nostalgic, but there is a problem. The Age of Mobility contained the seeds of its own destruction. The impossibility of moving fast in a fast-moving vehicle is a cruel paradox brought about by too many vehicles – a third of a million of them, to be exact. Nor are standstills any easier. I know people who are practically marooned in Sliema with a pathological terror of parking for dubious company.

Our politicians promise us trains, tunnels and trams, even as they dig up stands of pink and white oleander to make way for tidal lanes. Their proposed solution, in other words, is more mobility.

Except things may well go in a different direction. The consequences of the cruel paradox include such aesthetic gems as swearing, sweating, road rage and an intimate knowledge of the latest pop songs. Perhaps more importantly, they also include an Alcatel in reverse. Maybe it’s just me, but of late Malta feels a much bigger place.

Golden Bay seems distant enough to warrant a fish-oil scented swim at Delimara, and the papers are just as dull at the local garden as they are at Buskett.

I’ve also discovered that wardens draw the line at double parking, which means that the really convenient (and cheaper) kind of shopping is the one that’s round the corner. Pilgrimage, too, may yet rediscover its Chaucerian connotations.

I wouldn’t be surprised if even marriage reverted to a regional geography. It seems sensible to me to shop locally, simply because to do otherwise is too complicated. Call it the Second Age of Locality if you will.

mafalzon@hotmail.com