Nobody’s talking about the horrid building that recently surfaced down at the Exiles. Nobody’s writing about it either, which is odd because it hits you like a bullet in the head.
There’s no escaping it, however hard you try to look away. Once upon a time, this would undoubtedly have been splashed all over the newspapers, speculation would have been rife and the Malta Environment and Planning Authority would have had lots of explaining to do.
But we live in strange, unpredictable times where it is possibly easier to obtain a permit for the elephant on the beach than it is to wrangle one for a couple of makeshift umbrellas and a few chairs al fresco. While some operators spend years beating a path to one authority or another in the hope of securing a canopy and a bit of pavement to call their own, others seem to have it made in the shade.
The silence is particularly deafening because of what it ultimately signifies. That we have become so immune to the urban jungle that is Sliema, the day they erect an obtrusive concrete building down on the beach, spitting distance from the water’s edge, it ceases to matter. We’ve grown so accustomed to the dust, the drilling, the disorder, the debris and the din; so used to waking up to yet another beautiful old town house with its pretty shutters and old Maltese doors biting the dust, that we have learned to detach ourselves and, even worse, to live with it.
I feel the exact same way every time I see a horse-drawn karrozzin lugging the weight of four, pudgy, Dew Fresh pink tourists as I’m leaving Valletta over lunch. It’s never easy watching a horse trotting up a hill. But when you’re sitting inside your car, struggling to keep cool with the air conditioner on at full blast, and you catch a glimpse of that horse, it’s so much easier to look the other way than it is to wonder what sort of satisfaction these people can possibly derive, knowing they have a hand in putting an animal through legalised torture.
The combination of that hostile midday sun, the sight of the poor horse salivating and foaming at the mouth, wearing all his tack, replete with muzzle, bit, saddle and harness is a throwback to the Middle Ages and so not EU compliant, somehow.
I blame the Ministry of Finance. Since it has now assumed the collective moral responsibility of the country, it’s time it got off its moral high horse and did something about all its other furry friends. I say put an immediate stop to karrozzini operating during peak summer hours. It’s an inhumane and sadistic business which needs to go. And if it really has to stay, then it damn well needs to be regulated, morally and conscientiously.
Back to Sliema. I don’t think I could say it better than John Ed Pearce did when he said “home is the place you grow up wanting to leave and grow old wanting to get back to”.
There’s a magnetic allure surrounding the place where you grew up, which is hard to put to rest, and although I haven’t got statistics, I’d say it was a universally felt truth. Which is why people do their damndest to repossess the homes they lived in as children.
And if your childhood home is still intact and inhabited by your parents, it’s the reason you may still want to go back and sleep there, sometimes. Because your old room, with your beloved bed, although perhaps otherwise wholly unremarkable, remains special.
And by extension, the places you frequented as a child are the ones you still seek out as an adult. Which perhaps explains my anger with what they’ve done to the Exiles coast and skyline.
You see, tourists are infallibly drawn to parts of the island that have retained their old world charm, where police-stations are quaint and where banks look more like garages. And instead, we take the bank to the beach.
We’ve created a Banif Bank-like stark, cold, clinical concrete deposit, which has drowned out and killed the picturesque boat houses and shacks – the very elements that sell best and which tourists look for.
In the same way we killed off so many of our historic street names and the way certain people opt for aluminium or soffit ceilings in lieu of old, beautiful beamed ones, we keep trading in our Maltese soul for the soulless. We have this incredibly tragic knack of turning the extraordinary into the ordinary.
For, while I’m not against the granting of permits, when it comes to the last of the remains, I insist that the end result has got to be nothing short of spectacular.
Sometimes it does happen. I spent 36 years of my life studiously avoiding Armier because I found it squalid. Until one day, somebody with taste, decided to turn a little piece of it into an aesthetic slice of colonial looking heaven. And what do you know – it worked.
It’s high time we understood that ‘pretty’ pays off. We need to hang on to our natural rocks and resources, to our island’s charm, and we need our beaches to look optimum and to keep looking like beaches.
The sea is the one thing we really have going for us, apart from the sun, of course, which thankfully is too far out of our reach for us to screw up, otherwise we probably would.
Perhaps, what we really need is a minister exclusively for beaches. And she needs to be female or he needs to be gay or have exquisite taste at any rate.
We ought to take a leaf out of a Sardinia brochure and revamp and remodel all the concrete water polo pitches that stick out like sore thumbs.
This is how our €4 million should have been spent. Certainly not on a question the government didn’t want the answer to.
michelaspiteri@gmail.com