We live in exciting times. Hardly a week passes by without some roundabout being dug up and its common trees and shrubs replaced with fantastical and exotic creations.

If roundabouts could talk, we’d have to award them doctorates in sociology- Mark-Anthony Falzon

Take the famous ‘roundabout tal-moskea’ in Paola. Until re-cently a patch of mundane brown and green, weeks of grand design have transformed it into a disc of considerable wonder.

The pièce de résistance is a sort of rocky crag in one corner which is strongly reminiscent of a Leonardo landscape, in more ways than one.

The boulders take us to the depths of the designer’s psyche, possibly to a time when a child was once barred from building a Christmas crib.

I know I can hold my breath until the next fantasy. Malta’s love affair with roundabouts is flames for a year, more flames for 30.

For instance, they’re among our best-known landmarks. People will give you directions along the lines of ‘ħdejn ir-roundabout tal-Lidl’ (yes, that one), ‘wara r-roundabout tal-Iklin’, and so on. Would make for a wonderful dissertation in urban geography.

Which in a sense is funny considering how many of them there are.

It’s hardly possible to drive for more than a couple of hundred metres without tracing one or two semicircles. No wonder ‘drifting’ has become such a fad.

Their popularity probably has to do with too many cars for too little space.

More poetically, they could be seen as a metaphor for Malta itself. Ever the prolific mongerer of word games for our small island, Oliver Friggieri, comes to our rescue.

He speaks of Malta as a roundabout (among other things). By which he means a point of convergence but one which cars tend to pass by without stopping.

You could sit in the middle of a roundabout surrounded by chaos and cars rushing in every direction, and yet be perfectly still and untouched.

When someone does stop, we call it an accident.

The metaphor is obvious. The roundabout is Malta, happily placed at the centre of the Mediterranean.

The cars are modernity in its various forms but invariably in a hurry and never once intentionally stopping.

The accidents could be St Paul’s shipwreck or boatloads of African migrants.

Much as I dearly love Friggieri, I suspect roundabouts are not his field.

Historical finery apart, that’s because I would tend to read in them rather the opposite of what he does. It seems to me that if anything roundabouts are is-lands of modernity.

For one, they’re hardly static. I remember what they looked like in the 1980s.

Uncannily like the old Repubblika national emblem in fact, all prickly pear and hardy succulents and bare earth (thankfully no boats and pitchforks). Today’s specimens are different.

Take a couple of well-known examples. The roundabout at Kappara must be one of the most hideous corners of the planet, but that’s not the point.

Rather, it’s a monument to the improbable made possible by modern methods.

Left to its devices the turf would wither and the palm trees crash down.

The thing requires constant upkeep. It is not intended to look ‘natural’ but rather manufactured and manicured.

The thing down at Paola, sprawling by any standards, is another case in point.

Unhappy with a stand of eucalyptus trees that were perfectly capable of looking after themselves, the dream team moved in and transformed the place into a forest of sprinklers and notices.

The ‘Apologies for the Inconvenience’ signs seem to be there to stay, as do the crowds of men in orange running around gardening from dawn to dusk.

I’m saying that roundabouts have become the quintessential Potemkin villages.

The cylindrical clocks, originally put there to count down the formal adoption of the euro, say it all.

Roundabouts are green, European-looking, and all carefully-tended and signposted.

Their time is accurately clocked to the last millisecond. Above all they’re islands of modernity.

The metaphors do not stop there. Take the Roundabout Appreciation Society, based in Dorset. (Where else but deep in the country which gave us obsessive butterfly collecting?)

It’s a secretive club to boot but when a BBC reporter does manage the breach they tell us its members get together regularly to discuss roundabout architecture, design, safety features, and wildlife.

Their roundabouts calendar was an instant hit, shifting thousands in no time.

It gets quirkier. These gentlemen of leisure also claim to be able to tell a person’s character from the way they navigate a roundabout.

Thus ‘False-Start Florences’ are a tad over-cautious and tend to inch forward, ‘Dillons’ drive straight into a roundabout, and so on.

I had heard this before from a seller of car batteries whose shop was (still is, I think) strategically placed at a busy Marsa junction. “I’ve been here for many years,” he had told me, “and I’ve seen the Maltese character change.

People drive differently these days, they seem to have no sense of restraint, no patience, no sense of solidarity.”

Fancy that, a profound point on individualism made by someone whose adult waking life was spent watching cars whizz by.

Which makes me think that if roundabouts could talk, we’d have to award them doctorates in sociology.

Many readers will have been dragged along by tourist guides to the Miniature Switzerland ‘attraction’ in the Ticino.

I wish to suggest that Maltese roundabouts read along the same lines.

Should an enterprising photographer unpack a couple of fisheye lenses and come up with a calendar, I’d be the first taker.

mafalzon@hotmail.com