Airport

After several days of anxiety and speculation about our flight home being cancelled, here we are at the airport. All looks fine.

We heard the Portuguese airports are 'rammed'.  This is empty.  Hardly anyone about.  I think the whole place will have closed down completely by the weekend. Lockdown all around Europe.

The car hire check-in man was born in Canterbury, lived in Deal for years, moved to Malta a few months ago. Loves it. Wants to retire to Gozo.  Has no regrets.  He said our car had no new damage on it, which was great.... we had wondered, as every single panel had a scrape or a dint on it somewhere..... He said, 'No wonder the Maltese only drive old cars!'  

       

The day today was cool, grey, very British.   That made it less of a pain having to spend so many hours waiting at the airport .... which seemed sensible in case of any disruptions (plus so many places closed all around... nowhere else much to go!)  The sun has come out now but we are upstairs in the Departure lounge.  Small airports are so nice.         Clean, quiet, comfortable even.   We have access to sockets to charge up our phones.   

We'll be boarding  in about an hour. This bulletin is not very powerful, sorry!  It's more a way of filling in time while we wait. 

The internet is ALIVE with  opinions, community groupings, advice, suggestions, rumours, warnings.  Almost everything has been cancelled.  People are worrying whether they will be allowed to go for a walk. Especially if they are 'old'. I do wonder what we are going back to!  People  have been posting photos of the empty shelves at the Faversham supermarkets.  A kind of madness seems to have seized people.... anxiety,  survival instinct, propriety.  'SMINE!!!'  

What a world!

Intimations of apocalyptic times

We had a quiet day, overshadowed by the effects of the reactions to the virus. How fast it has changed everything. The family are still urging us to get home quick - the airline is about to cancel flights, they say… but the website says all is ok.  The flight is still on time.  We checked with the travel insurance: we’re both covered for up to £5k for disruption, if the airline cancels. There are now no flights earlier than the one we’re booked on tomorrow evening anyway. So we’re hoping for a smooth journey home…. and crossing fingers for no bad news by email from Easyjet.

Today we stayed in the local area - a walk, and a coffee.  The cafe was very quiet... the owner was distracted by what's going on, delighted we had stopped. Then we went for a quiet stroll. In the deep gorge running down through the town we saw the only swimming pool we've seen this week...maybe belonging to a fancy hotel/spa nearby. No-one was in it, but the gardens all around were pretty and made a change from the dry, stony, structural nature of the whole place. Then we were looking for lunch, and amazingly we found a place which was open! Truth to tell we had an indifferent meal, but the building was amazing - we wouldn’t have gone in otherwise…. It was once a quarry, then a hostel with stables on the ground floor with rooms above, a bomb-shelter, a tunnel to the old church half a kilometre away,  a school, a residence, and now a ‘traditional’ eating house. The waiter first looked after us with bare hands, but half-way through the meal appeared with blue surgical gloves on. 

   

  

Later we drove round to the local bay - brilliant blue water, some wind-surfers and para-surfers taking advantage of the very brisk and chilly wind. Out on the far horizon, like a ghost, a huge tall sailing ship skudded across, with gleaming white sails. (This was apparently the Shtandart Swedish sailing vessel en route to Sicily then Sète in France). It looked quite apocalyptic. 

     

   

All around us, people are making deep dark changes to their planned life.  Quite unprecedented in my lifetime, and maybe since the 17th century…. (plague).   Facebook is full of it, and Twitter. Events cancelled. Announcements of social isolation, self-imposed, or maybe (who knows) enforced by the authorities, or vigilantes?  Arguments about what we should all be doing. There is a lot of virtue-signalling. Also a lot of fear and anxiety.  And I detect a sort of ghoulish gung-ho spirit: this is how we’re going to tackle the problem. Weird dissonant announcements and interpretations, based on - what, exactly? Guesses? The experience of other countries (where things may be different)? Already, the military have been ‘activated’ in Bern, in Switzerland…. for support and logistics…. so that’s martial law, isn’t it?  Who can walk where? What changes are made while we are all so preoccupied with this? May’s elections have been cancelled.  Lockdown. Cancellations. Travel bans. Shortages in shops. Rationing?  Who knows?  Who really is the expert? 

The CEO of Sainsbury’s sent out an email today in which he said they have plenty of supplies in their warehouses. He just needs customers to be temperate in their purchases, stop bulk-buying, take only what’s necessary.   His staff will work hard to make sure we all get what we need.  He signed off: ‘Best wishes, Mike’.   Mike!  

An Italian guy (wind surfer) down by the bay said Britain ‘always’ wins. He admires how we’re leaving the EU. Adamant. 

Around him, old and new boats on the quay were presumably waiting for buyers… some beautiful old fishing boats, with three props; a big old wooden trawler type, also with three props (and three engines?); some modern steel vessels, two of which had eyes on either side of the prow.    

      

We bought two artichokes for our supper this evening from yet another tiny local grocers… the two gangways were so narrow and awkward we had to wait to get through. Although it was all very small and dark, like all these tiny shops it was crammed with every kind of tinned and packed food you could possibly want. Only the greengrocery looked a bit sad. 

 I meant to say earlier, so many of the houses here have names - St Andrew, St  Rita, Stella Maris, Mater Dei, Good House… And so many have tiny plaques beside the front doors, dedicated to the Virgin and Child. Really, we have seen dozens, maybe hundreds.  It’s as if the Fat Ladies of Malta have left the island in Her capable hands… the goddess is still waiting, everywhere you look. It’s a lovely place. 

Fishing

During the night, urgent and well informed messages from family (one being a travel expert, another a health expert) were pushing for us to at least investigate getting home early.  However, the airline was really very backward in coming forward with any information or guidance.  One auto-response said they’d get back to us in 28 days. Another said the helplines and chatlines are not open for a few hours yet and are in any case very busy.  We were faced with our own powerlessness. Step One! 

Being Sunday, it had always been our plan to go south to Marsaxlokk, the fishing village with a colourful market and harbour, so that’s what we did. The route skirting the inner suburbs of Valletta was exciting to say the least, with violent swoops and turns, short-notice changes of lane, and the satnav unable to keep up.  However, of course, in the end we made it down to the quay, a wide and colourful place filled with bobbing boats, huge cranes on the skyline at the freeport, a massive gas-tanker-ship out at anchor, and a lot of hopeful market traders with masses of gleaming fish, veg, leather goods, dried foods, trinkets and the like.    

    

   

  

However, there were really hardly any visitors.  A glum atmosphere pervaded. There were some French visitors, but I think most were British, and as far as we could hear, everyone was talking about coronavirus and its dire consequences.  We had a coffee, mooched around.  We need not have worried about avoiding crowds… there were hardly any.  The water was pretty clean, we could see baby fish in the depths.  

The name Marsaxlokk comes from a wind, which blows from the south. The fish on sale were very varied, some obviously farmed  (you can see the tanks out in the bays), but some so bright and shining and unusual that they must have just come out of the depths in a time honoured way. 

  

We stopped for another refreshment and a Geordie lass leapt up to take our photo for us…. she had moved to Malta a few months ago. She loved it.  Her cleavage was spectacular. Her skirt was very short and the snakeskin belt very tight. Her thick black tights had impressive ladders in them. She had the company of two guys for her coffee break and kept urging us to move to the island.  Why go back? she asked.  Why not stay?  She had heard that the government was going to impose a lockdown from 19th-24th, and then stop it. 

We walked back and round to the eastern end, to a handy little beach, and into a tourist office. The instant and obligatory hand-sanitising meant we could talk to the lady sitting in there. She said she’d heard there might be action from the Maltese government, going on through April and May. She confirmed what we had already discovered - that all the churches and museums are now closed. The tourist industry will suffer.

 Lunch was really very good indeed at a small place set back from the quay - Terrone. The Serbian waiter and his staff were attentive, brought us our one starter to share (stuffed courgette flowers, deep fried), and then a single plate of two Striped Mullet steaks with roasted vegetables, again to share. 

  

Absolutely superb, and with a couple of desserts it came to 49€.   We have tootled back along the coast, not calling in to the temple sites or the famous Blue Grotto - just looking from a distance.   

  

We’ve checked again with EasyJet - they are waiving flight-change charges but we’d still have to pay for £68 each to get onto the midday flight home on Tuesday (first available seats)… that is just about 6 hours earlier than our original bookings, so we’re sticking with Plan A.  Back here in the flat, we hear the birdsong all around.  We have driven past miles and miles of beautiful drystone walls, some tumbling down, some so new and precise they almost hurt to look at. We stopped at a roadside veg shop and bought a little bag of chard to have for supper.  One more day (Monday), then pack up and go home on Tuesday evening DV.   

Beauty v violence

The hilltops in Malta are adorned with spectacular mini-cities of the most beautiful golden stone buildings and tiny alleys, and with highly ornamented church domes, towers, pyramids etc on the skyline, and each with a gorgeous and always violent history.  

This tension - between beauty and danger - has pervaded our ill-timed little holiday. The tsunami of the new world plague (coronavirus) has overwhelmed everything. Each day has brought a rising tide of panicky news about regulations imposed by shops, councils, governments - and maybe airlines.  We have already witnessed the local shopping madness - supermarkets limiting how many people may go into their stores: you can only go in once some other person has come out. Luckily for us we are getting our meagre supplies of say, wine, milk, bread, salads, cheese, etc. from little local epiceries, which are pretty amazing.  The internet is awash with rumours, contradictions, certainties and anguish.  The family is taking a strong line: that we should cut things short and get home immediately. Today is Sunday - trip to fishing market planned. Now considering whether to take all belongings with us and just decamp.  Pros and cons: in favour of leaving early - the tourist experience has definitely diminished quite noticeably each day with closures of venues and services. It would be nice to know we can get home. I didn’t bring enough stuff to last more than a week - including my all-precious JuicePlus capsules!   On the other hand, changing flights, relinquishing the apartment early, fixing it, may be time-consuming and stressful…. we both need a rest!

So today - we are trying to contact the airline, the landlord, decide what to do.  Not so carefree. Boo hoo.  It's hard to say if the curtailment of our planned activities is a good thing or not...

Yesterday we went to Mosta to see the Dome - but it was closed on orders of the archbishop. I drew it instead. Andrew sneaked a peek by talking to a builder. 

We had lunch in Mdina - where lots of things were closed. The silent city was actually quite quiet, apart from birdsong. These places are full of spectacular buildings, grand, egotistical, heroic, splendid.   

    

As in so many islands we have visited, the northern areas are by far the most beautiful, being less scorched by the summer’s heat. Our pretty view from our lunch terrace was over small fields and greenery, quite comforting and restful.   The owner of a gift shop was looking very melancholy indeed. The rumours of lockdown are everywhere. Her shop - which would on a normal Saturday be full of people - was empty. She was selling loads of things at halfprice.  The security man we spoke to at Xhaghra had said there were no coach tours. No doubt the boat-based tourist trips will all have to stop. It's an economic disaster for this island. This may be the only thing holding the Maltese government back from issuing lockdown orders...... 

  

We found the Victoria Lines - a bit of late 19thc British military engineering designed to thwart any dastardly enemies who might want to sneak in and seize the all-important naval ports in the south (especially after the opening of the Suez canal) by attacking from the north. So they built a 12km wall, not very high, but taking advantage of a natural outcrop or ridge of rock… It was never tested in battle, and is now a place of wild flowers, bees, peasant farms, hikers and and pretty views. 

 We ended our rather self-isolating wanderings by going to a beach... lovely clear water, a few fish, some boats. 

Once again we found that the food portions served in restaurants is far too large - we shared one starter and one main meal - couldn’t finish it - came home at last and picked at an artichoke for supper.  

Gozo

Over to Gozo. It's noticeable that the familiar 3-chambered temple/nuraghi design we have seen in Sardinia and at Skorba (and extended at Ta Hagrat) was further developed at Xhagra - here, the two buildings, side by side, have five and four room-sized niches. Some of these at least had shelves or tables, and parts of the floor are still equipped with splendid flooring, paved with smooth stones.  No signs of any passages inside the walls, let alone staircases to take you up to a viewing point or rooftop. The roofs have completely gone.... speculation is that these were timber or plant-based. 

    

The corbelling of the wall-to-ceiling is as good as any we’ve seen, though at Xhagra there is some corbelling on the outside of one of the buildings, which the authorities have taken to be a sign of instability… it’s propped up with scaffolding, but it looks pretty intentional to me. The question would be, was there another room out there? Seems unlikely. I don’t know!

Here they found such treasures, in the late 20th century digs - stone-age pottery with inscribed designs such as this bird - maybe a Northern Lapwing.  And many fat ladies, and seated figures, and bowls, and beads and so on.  (The earlier digs, throughout the 19th century were so badly done that most of what was found has been lost, destroyed, eroded, or somehow vanished. Some excellent drawings and watercolours remain, which they've used to reconstruct the extant displays). 

Initial disappointment that the museum shop at Xhagra had been closed for health reasons (‘we’ve come all this way! I want to buy some replica goddesses!’) was later assuaged by finding the archaeology museum in Victoria’s amazing Cittadella open, and with similar figurines for sale. Phew!   Sadly, I could not see a replica of the remarkable little temple-model which was found at Hagrat. That throws light on the whole culture of building huge expensive difficult structures in the stone age, before alphabets.  How on earth did they do it? 

I am feeling a bit twitchy about the curtailed nature of the explanations at all these places. No mention of birth-giving and its perils, in other words, life!  They focus on the burials and later cremations and say it was a centre for a death cult. No understanding of the spirals, which are cyclical symbols - about fertility and divine or magic femininity.  No overt mention of the lack of weapons. Barely a thought for the female half of society… even though there are these dozens and dozens of female figurines, and even then they say some of them could be male. No mention of astronomical alignments - solstices etc.  They talk about the landscape, the location being chosen for its usefulness - access to fresh water, good land - but without any sense of any interaction between the powers and rituals of the ‘temple’ and its influence in that landscape…. The site of Xhagra is pretty good, on a southish-facing slope, with a view of hills and valleys, and the sea and Malta.  A place for renewal and hope, extending benevolence over a whole visible district.   The tone of all the interpretations is dry, dull, obvious, practical, modern.  

One object in the visitor centre stood out to me: the skull of a young woman which was used by scholars at the University of Dundee for a reconstruction. She emerges as a beautiful - almost instantly recognisable person. It’s a triumph of anatomical creativity… but the main thing is her actual teeth! They are perfect, shining, unblemished.  Whatever she ate, she had no caries.  Would that mine were like that.

  

By the way, the Cittadella at Victoria (Gozo’s capital) is a mini-city on the hill top a bit like a sunny Gormenghast, with fantastic buildings of many eras, another place which UNESCO has its eye on.  In 1551 when the Turks overran the island, people only escaped enslavement by shimmying down a huge terrifying wall and cliff to escape. Agh! Lots of museum-y bits were closed, but it’s so extensive and attractive we didn’t mind. 

I will make a note about how we go about, in our little hired car. It is a blessing to us fuddy-duddies to be driving on the left. We stop for lunch out wherever we are, and find the menus tempting - quite Italian in influence with pasta and pizza as well as Maltese specialities such as rabbit and fish.  The portions are huge!  We come home to have (if anything) a picnic style light supper.   We failed to buy milk from a supermarket yesterday as there were long queues to get IN!  You're only allowed in if someone comes out.  The panic and generalised mob reaction to the coronavirus is unsettling.  Who knew that there was a world-wide preoccupation with bum-wiping? (I thought it was just me). The ferry to and from Gozo is quick and efficient - you only pay coming back to Malta. 

Valletta - first visit

Three strong impressions from the day….

One, that we misread the mapping from the phones, compounded by the very unfamiliar place names. We had planned to get the little ferry into Valletta from suburb/outlier of the community of Sliema - just for the fun of it.  Inadvertently we drove into Valletta itself, found a parking place far far along the rough track by the sea under the fortifications, and jumped on the ferry only to find ourselves on the wrong side of the water and not in Valletta at all!   I report this because it shows how easily one can believe one’s own assumptions: I thought we were in Sliema, when the mapping clearly showed the directions (N/S) were all the wrong way round and still I didn’t twig. Not till the lady in the Tourist Info at Sliema told us, did we understand. She said there was nothing to see in Sliema - just shopping malls and commercial buildings. We saw Mothercare (closed now in the UK), M&S, Accessorize, HSBC, Matalan, etc etc, none of which were of any interest to us. The quayside is clean and tidy, and being upgraded to provide smoother and swifter passenger experience for those embarking on the various tourist and ferry boats.

Two: that Valletta is a really lovely place to be. The grid-pattern of streets up and down over the great ridge is surrounded by massive fortifications around the sea wall, and with at least a few quaint place-names reassuring to a Brit abroad - Old Bakery Street, Merchants Street, Windmill, etc.   

          

The architecture is really interesting, with great examples from all the preceding centuries, and lots of swagger. There are humble artisan dwellings, palazzos, statuary, balconies, churches, greater and lesser squares, dark alleys, a comfortable international atmosphere, lots of cafes with all the benefits of the Italian cuisine, and (oh dear) that comforting British smattering of signs and telephone boxes. We felt at home. I particularly liked the tradition of the decoration on the corners of buildings, looking like piles of sandwiches.

     

We strolled about, found lunch (Maltese rabbit stew for milord, and meagre fish for me).  I had forgotten that Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to live here (1804/5) and later a friend prompted me to seek out the Carravaggio  paintings. We will go back before we leave Malta to find them.  The whole city - like the whole island - represents the full history of Europe, and the present crisis (coronavirus, supremacy of fascism/banking culture, digital take-over of old ways of doing things). And, this could be one of the most fortified cities in Europe too, with fortresses and barracks and towers and huge walls dominating every part of the scenery, especially at the waterfront.    Collecting our car, we laughed at the huge rocky potholes which create a kind of terrible game for any drivers who’ve crept down there, past the old fishermen’s dock, and round the headland facing into the easterly winds.

  

Three: I wanted to get into the National Museum of Archaeology to better understand the Neolithic and maybe Bronze Age history of Malta, and I found it so overwhelming that I can scarcely begin to describe its treasures.   I had heard of the Fat Ladies of Malta, but had no idea of how many there are, or how fat.  Over the past few years, I have built up a small collection of replica ‘goddesses’ from Greece, the Cyclades, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, Spain, France, Germany, the Balkans, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, etc etc., and developed a sense of how widespread and ‘ordinary’ or humdrum these little figures often were.  To me they were at least partly some kind of talisman against the perils of childbirth, and a celebration of sex and fertility, and the idea of the earth as a female thing.  Adorned with or accompanied by spirals, archways, sometimes stars and those ‘hooked diamonds’, they had a universality, and their placement in locations such as Newgrange with its solstice alignments showed how informed the people of the late Ice Age were. They all come from a time long before writing of any kind, and indeed before weapons were even thought of. Along with scrapers and hooks and needles, they were just part of the toolkits needed to survive, spiritual spanners, personal portraits.     

But the Maltese ‘Ladies’ are so remarkable even in their fragmentary condition, they outshine most of the rest.  They celebrate a colossal corpulence. They do seem to be female (though one note says they may also include males… I didn’t see that, but still….).  For some reason, vast oozing fatness was an important aspect - at least for some time.  Some of the figurines are just female and not fat.  One at least has nine little marks on its back, perhaps counting the months of pregnancy.  Many have the triangular delineations of the pubic area.  Some are headless, or seem to be made to have different heads attached to them.  Some were found beside or on top of blocks of stone decorated with spirals or interlacing circular C-shaped whorls.  But mostly, staggeringly, they were fat.  Were these fat women depictions of Mother Earth? Of a goddess? Of priestesses? We don’t know. So much of the archaeology was done in the 1920s - clumsy and inadequate we think now, in the face of more recent technical methods of analysis.  But it was all pre-writing - so there are no records, or even myths or legends.   The people who made the temples and carvings and clay figurines seem to have come to Malta from Sicily, and they were farmers.   There was a long gap before the Bronze Age people arrived - and nothing to explain why the Stone Age people disappeared…. they don’t seem to have been the same people.  The Bronze Age brought weapons, and male deities… the old mothering earth cults just faded away into nothing.   I felt overwhelmed by all this, what it could all mean, and calmed myself by doing some drawings - very quick - of some of the exhibits. 

      

    

In the Museum, they have banned cash exchanges (cards only), and no audio guides, because of the virus. So I may have missed a lot of information which has been gleaned since the quite wordy information boards beside the exhibits. I bought three more replica ‘goddesses’, of poor quality but at least attempting to describe the shapes of the females found in the stony fields between the wars.  There is also a repro model of the cart-ruts which have baffled historians, and which we failed to find on Day 1, with a very good video made by British archaeologist Dr David Trump who seems to have devoted his life to the treasures of the island.   Seeing him wipes away a lot of the pain and misery inflicted by his namesake. There are good Trumps, too.

At the supermarket back at Mellieha, there was pandemonium. Whereas the day before it had all been quiet and orderly, we found it heaving with people with trollies and baskets overflowing. The queues stretched right through the store.  Apparently the government has announced the closure of all schools, so that set everyone off into sensible/panic mode. It took us nearly 25 minutes of queueing to buy a loaf and a bar of chocolate. Eheu!