My first experience with gold was far from positive. While we had lived abroad, my mother had never got round to piercing my ears, but the minute we moved back to Malta, she took both me and my sister to a local shop and had our ears pierced.

A few weeks later, she brought out a few pairs of gold earrings that we had received as gifts and allowed us to choose which ones we wanted.

Having always been a bit of a magpie, I remember feeling pretty chuffed with the gold, pearl and crystal cluster that I chose, however, that feeling was unfortunately shortlived.

You see, when I went to school the next day a universally disliked classmate of mine took one look at them and told me that they were chavvy. And when I wondered loudly why, having not really grasped what made my cherished choice so horrible, she bluntly informed me that they were gold and apparently, only ħamalli wear gold.

She bluntly informed me that they were gold and apparently, only ħamalli wear gold

Well, at that point I barely knew what a ħamallu was, but having always been the type of person to not give two figs rubbed together about what others thought, I completely ignored the girl and wore them for pretty much the rest of the year.

When I eventually told my mother what I had been told in passing, she laughed and told me that as long as I liked them, it didn’t matter what people thought (there really is a lot to be said for a mother that tells you not to care about what other people think and actually leads by example).

Ironically, I bumped into the same classmate recently and was quite amused to find that if the gold hoops she was wearing are anything to go by, she too seems to have outgrown her particularly myopic vision of jewellery, if not life.

So what’s my point? My point is that in times like these, where division becomes an everyday and glaringly ugly fact, we ought to have the courage and the strength to be kind to ourselves and to others regardless of their beliefs (and earring choices). That 10-year-old girl wasn’t attacking me personally but she was merely reacting to something she had been presented with as fact long before I showed up on our beautiful, sunny shores.

The 10-year-old me wasn’t bothered about what other people thought about my earring choices and instead I opted to focus on the way my mother lovingly helped me pick them out and on how happy I was with them.

Let’s not lose sight of the important things that make us unique, while striving to try to find unity in our many, often radical, colourful differences; our country depends on it.