Thoughts and happenings from a life on Malta

A little joy for someone living on an island is to walk along the coast, possibly barefoot on a sandy shore, seeing all manner of debris that the currents and waves have unloaded there. Plastic bottles or their tops are particularly common, as is wood from some dismembered crates or pieces of coloured rope that have become fed up of being tied up. Worthless though they are, in the eyes of a child they must appear as treasures offloaded from some pirate ship.

Very rarely, the same sea that washes this island’s littoral brings with it a real treasure, even to the eyes of an adult. It needn’t be the fabled padlocked chest of gold and jewels but something more valuable…..someone more precious.

My derrière is ensconced in the protective husk of a wicker seat at Portomaso Cafe. The eyes, having nothing better to do, lazily follow a line of vacant chairs which sit outside, silent props to the movie that plays within this coffee shop’s glass walls. It’s when I descry what appears to be a bronze bust appended to the back of one of the seats that the casualness of my glance fixes into the steadiness of a gaze.

As the eye lingers analytically, it transpires that there is, after all, a human form attached; one with a bronzeness of hair that is inversely proportional to his less than monumental build. If I were to be a mite less polite, I’d say his phosphorous head is an appropriate addendum to his stick-like body. Fittingly, his physique complements his cigarette addiction. Yet, despite the tranquillising effect the drug is supposed to impart, his feet tap away frenziedly, outracing by far the rapid swings of his right arm as it dutifully performs its role of fag holder-cum-conveyor.

I study his absent looks and can see that he’s lost in the brume of nicotine that clouds an otherwise clear January day. We’re just a few hours into another new year but I swear he must be weeks away, even months, because I catch his thoughts dawdling in the shade of a darker cloud.

So much profit can be made out of  a quiet day.

Profit 1

By 0730 I was already stripping down to my shorts and T-shirt at ir-Ramla tal-Mixquqa (renamed Golden Bay by the British colonizers because they found the Maltese version to be quite a tongue twister). I hadn’t been doing  any sport, apart from the occasional trek, in a long while so this first jog was to be a gentle reminder to the heart that it must be prepared to start exerting itself again. Twenty minutes was the plan, twenty minutes is what I did. If truth be told though, the heart was pounding louder and harder than that made by the impact of my leaden legs on the sand.

Profit 2

My intention was to soak up some winter sunshine while listening to and rating a Hits of the 80scompilation at the Upper Barrakka Gardens in Valletta. Instead, on a bench located towards the quieter back part of the garden, I got out my Moleskine notebook and flipped through the pages. On one of them, I had a spider-gram with a few thoughts I had jotted down weeks earlier. Glancing at it, some new ideas sparked in my head, stimulating the pen to paper. Before I knew it, my watch had fast-forwarded by 3 hours and a near complete draft of my first-ever short story had spread itself across 5 pages!