I overheard a friend the other day half-complain about the time she’s been spending on buses – literally hours every day appa-rently. Still, my friend is a forgiving sort who oozes humour. She’s decided that the received wisdom that ‘time is money’ is too damn bourgeois and that it’s actually nice to sit back in cool comfort and watch the world sail by.

I’d be inclined to do the same. There is, however, one thing about the new bus service which, try as I might, I can’t seem to digest. It’s the fares. I simply cannot accept that ‘non-residents’ should be made to fork out almost double the standard ‘local’ fare.

Hand on heart, I’m so ruffled I’ve sworn not to touch an Arriva bus unless the madness stops. Should my car call it a day, I’ll buy some bicycle oil and keep the Greens happy.

There are at least three reasons why the double-decker fares are so nasty. The first has to do with how we relate to tourists and ‘foreigners’ of various sorts. I can’t see why people should pay more for the same service simply because they do not have a Maltese identity card. It’s basically the same suicidal and unjust logic that tourists complain about every time they buy a bottle of fizzy from a seaside kiosk. Only this time it’s official and infinitely worse for that.

Let’s be realistic about this. Truth be told, most tourists can live with the idea that locals will always tend to pay a bit less for their fruit and veg. I suppose it happens everywhere and always will as long as business is conducted by people who live in places. What tourists can’t stomach is being systematically and blatantly ripped off at every turn.

Take two Indian cities. The taxi drivers and rickshawallahs of Mumbai may be a noisy and sweaty bunch but they’re seldom dishonest. If you were square enough to investigate you would probably find that the lady who uses the same rik day in day out to go to work pays a few rupees less per trip. That’s about it. You don’t feel cheated or unwelcome, just an average outsider.

Delhi is a different matter. Drivers there have a nasty habit of ganging up to cheat tourists, shamelessly and in a big way.

Getting around in that city boils down to endless rounds of humourless haggling. That’s unless you’re prepared to shut up and get fleeced gracefully. But it’s not nice to feel like an idiot and it does leave a bad taste in one’s mouth.

I’m afraid Arriva has modelled itself on Delhi. Behind the starched collars and suave ‘customer care’, what we have is a company ganging up to overcharge ‘non-residents’.

We’re told the European Commission is looking into it. In other words, the worst possible approach to EU legislation: ‘let’s see if we can get away with this’. (If we can’t, we still get to keep the extra money we’ve made so far.)

Like hell the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association have good reason to complain. The Maltese bus has metamorphosed from quaint attraction to giant tourist-guzzling insect, overnight. Someone was telling me of a bunch of British tourists who set up a monumental moan on a bus to Birgu the other day. Good thing we don’t understand Swiss-German.

The second reason I refuse to take a bus is the ID card business. I quite simply don’t like to be reminded of the Gestapo and their fixation with travelling documents every time I go shopping in Valletta. It’s bad enough to have to do the full monty at airports.

ID cards contain all manner of fairly private information. I can just about see why my bank, or the driving-licence office, might want to match those data to my mugshot. As for the simple and daily business of boarding a bus, sorry, I’m not prepared to have to share my private life with a stranger. It’s a bus journey for heaven’s sake, not a visit to a high-security prison.

Some might object I’m tilting at windmills, that I would not in fact be asked to produce my ID. That’s because I’m as Maltese as it gets. I look Maltese and speak Maltese. I even have to work hard to stay off the national insomma-face. It would take a particularly culturally-clueless driver to ask to see my papers.

Which brings me to my third point. This newspaper has a useful habit of reminding me why I’m so privileged to write for it. Of late that has come in the form of reports of bus drivers doing the Gestapo thing on the basis of appearance. Too many freckles? ID card please.

Of course Arriva will deny this. It is not, after all, official policy. (That’s ID card at all times apparently.) But it’s both natural and unavoidable for bus drivers, who deal with many hundreds of customers a day, to lapse into inquisition by physical selection. And that’s bad, very very bad. I won’t even give you the obvious bit about the African with a Maltese ID card.

It can be most unnice to be singled out as ‘non-local’-looking. That’s because the relation between provenance and physical appearance is never naive. It was not so long ago that ‘qisha Ingliża’ (‘she looks English’) was a compliment and ‘qisu Tork’ (‘he looks like a Turk’, that is to say swarthy) not quite. Readers will get my drift.

I really can’t be too bothered about the waiting times and snakes-and-ladders-like routes. Arriva is probably right to ask us for some patience on those, and it has also given a fair bit in return – new bus lanes, considerable seating comfort, and the rest. It’s the institutionalised discrimination that gets me. If only I didn’t enjoy ice-cream so much, I’d be inclined to go off eating.

mafalzon@hotmail.com