Sometimes I ask myself: “Why didn’t our forebears tear down their houses and build flats instead? Is it because the ideadidn’t occur to them?”

When I lived at Sta Venera in the 1950s and 1960s, there was no building construction going on in my neighbourhood. Everything seemed settled for good. The present-day Maltese have gone mad over real estate, and their madness has now reached a feverish pitch: tearing down their own homes or building more floors above them – anything to keep their restless souls busy.

When I returned to Malta in the mid-1990s, after an absence of 24 years, I used to eavesdrop on conversations among Maltese men at Sliema cafes. Most of the time, the conversations centred on real estate, notaries, lawyers, and lawsuits.