suggzy

Part Two

Ah. So not exactly a week, then?

Oops. Last third of last year got characterised by rather a lot of running about, in the end. Just as I was threatening to unleash this ninth piece upon the reading public. Oh well. More interviews, and a temporary job that somehow became a sort of temporary/permanent hybrid, and another job sifting through 641 dull applications in the hopes of finding a non-existent jewel. Trying, at times, bundled in with Christmas and illness, and canine duty and all that, but at least we’re rather more thriving than we were.. and, whisper it, country number 50 may be on the cards come June! A foray into Andorra, no less! So, for now, I shall finish the Maltese tale, and we’ll see what we get up to after that – I may diversify for a while and touch on some other subjects, who knows? There’s certainly a piece to be written some time on the subject of job interviews. Oh my, there is. If not an actual fully paid-up job, I most certainly should have been afforded some sort of medal by now. Anyway, back to that another time. For now… <scenes fades expertly into 2013>…

At last our holiday was actually beginning. An amount of investigation revealed that the bus would pick up near enough opposite the hotel, so something, at least, was going right. And on the face of it there were timetabled to be about 12356672195 services per day, and a couple of the routes went through Slima. One could pay on board, and they charged near enough nothing. A Euro, if I remember right.

Eventually a bus rather Chitty Chitty Bang Banged into view. It was blue, flaking, noisy, and I think dated from about 1958. So warmish, too. We boarded, paid our nugatory fares, and clung onto the soft furnishings, as we made our way onto the main drag, to make our way from Bugibba (where it transpired we were based) back to Slima. This journey was one rendered halting and slow by a lot of later-afternoon traffic, and really provided no hint at all of what was to come. We even had a seat, after a while, and I took a few early photos. Around 45 minutes into the journey we emerged at a promenade, and Mother left the bus apace, with me trotting gently behind her. The ferry crossing was not far away, and we were ten minutes or so ahead of time before the closing service of the day, with the option of a bus back up the coast later. So, she was dispatched to purchase the tickets for our floatation, and I made out on foot to buy us a couple of cold bottles of water. And promptly nearly got into a fight.

I’ve mentioned before that I have an unfortunate habit of, with no intention of doing so, winding people up. However as I have got older I have got a little more vocal about matters when I think I am being treated badly; as should we all. I think this little tale plays me out fairly blamelessly.

50 yards down the main drag, before all the bars and restaurants and tourist offices and hotels really thickened out, there was one of those vans, with a hinged-open side. One buys burgers, kebabs and the like from them. Know the sort I mean? I approached, jingling my change from the bus, all smiles and holiday spirits once again, and waited my turn in the queue. As the punter ahead of me breezed off with an ice cream, I met with the face, albeit briefly, of the proprietor. He was, I think, 15. But one of those 15-year-olds so fleshy in adolescent construction from a mountain of sweets and chips as to have the bearing of an unfit Prop-forward. Lank hair, and an early attempt at a moustache of the most misplaced vainglory. I daresay some quite harrowing halitosis, too, had I been able or willing to draw near enough to sample it. I don’t sound very kind to him, no, but then again he was most unpleasant to me. You be the judge.

He eyed me quite clearly with a scowl before turning into the van to light up a ciggie. Tough day in the office, evidently. Still, you know, service industry and all that. I fished out my change and gave a polite and gentle cough of the sort designed to request attention inoffensively.

“WHAT?” he roared back at me, wobbling a little back through 180 degrees.

Bit startled. Be firm old man, I told myself.

“Two bottles of water please, one flat and one sparkl..”

“UGH!” he came back.

I stood off, as the lad sliced his way into the stockroom out the back, rendering cardboard asunder, and emerged with two bottles of warm water, and dumped them on the side in front of me, eyeing me up and down, just defying me to say a word out of turn. No indication of the price, at this point, so I drew out a fiver of the local, stead, and popped it down lightly. He made off with it, like a chunky Gollum heading back into the cave.

Nope, I wasn’t having it. This was no occasions for tipping. I pulled out the light cough a second time.

“WHAT, YOU!?” he enquired, in enraged fashion.

“My change, perhaps?” I replied sweetly.

A long stare, and with a Batman cartoon like <WHAM!> my 2€ change was driven into the counter, sending a bottle onto the ground for me to pick up. I gathered my money and my water, and stood back up. He was still there, radiating his rage through me and into the harbour beyond. I met him with my Best British Piercing Gaze, and a slightly jaunty eyebrow. Taking a bit of a risk here; he could comfortably have eaten two of my limbs in a sitting.

“WHASSA!? YOU GOTTA PROBLEM?! I COME ROUN’ THERE?” him bumfluff moistened.

I paused just long enough to see a few of his veins wriggle to the surface before popping the smile on again, just as his next customer (and my potential witness) arrived and issued a final retort:

“Not necessary my dear chap. Thanks ever so much.”

Clicked my heels and turned on them off in the direction of my Mother. I mused for a bit that in a different life I might perhaps have bopped the cheeky young git one on the hooter, but on balance contented myself with the side of that particular counter I was on, and the surety that his Duke of Edinburgh Award would likely be a long time in arriving.

From that point, as we swung across the water into Valletta, things looked up. Actually there is a lot of looking up, in that delightful city, as it’s about 80% steps. And, in an Escher-like way, they’re always upward steps. Still, as the heat waned a bit we started to soak it all in, and very fine it was. Not a huge amount of time to actually do anything that first day, of course, but certainly to get the sense of the place. Beautiful it was, too, with water all-around, cobbled, higgledy-piggledy, streets lined with sensitively mixed buildings from the present and the past. It was busy, but wholly friendly and enthusiastic, it seemed to me (take that, Waterboy).

After a time we decamped to get some nosebag and a cold drink down us. On a recommendation from a friend we dropped in for an hour or two for some free WiFi, a local beer and some wine and two courses of cheap and largely delicious food at the Café Jubilee. I qualify that particular delicious just a tad, because, me being me, I had to dive straight into the localmost local thing on the menu, which was a sort of filo pastry cheese and spinach pie: Torta ta L-Irkotta.  All jolly well, yes, but one of those crisp filo pastries that just seems to fracture and shed, everywhere (like a petrol station sausage roll eaten behind the wheel) and put one at the constant risk of breathing in slightly too hard and choking to death on the resultant shrapnel. Took the edge off a bit, but still a real lip-smacking experience. We clarified that he who had been left behind was surviving as best he could, and I attempted some distant flirtation with SWK, and started a week of boring the arse of Mother about her Daughter-in-Law-to-be. I was buzzing with the buzz of the Truly Smitten.

We rolled out of there, and walked back up the main drag to the ‘bus station’ for our first Malta Night Bus experience.

To describe it as a bus station entirely oversells it, by modern standards. It was a large traffic island, with vehicular stopping points every few yards, set at 45-degree angles from the flow of traffic. The commencement of each and every journey from this dusty terminus necessitated that the driver should reverse his steed back out into the flow of traffic, people eating their evening kebab, and milling, cheese-filled tourists with their Mothers in tow. For all the chaos, there was at least a modern scoreboard, which gave reasonably accurate information about which buses were due in, where they were due in, and where they were going to.

Reasonably accurate? Yes. Consistently? No. We didn’t get on the wrong bus; it’s just that the right bus was in the wrong place, so by the time we boarded it was heaving. No hope of a seat for Mother, so we clung to one another, and such of the fabric of the bus that had survived the decades as we could lay hands on.

Grandson of a bus driver that I am, my first instinct with a cargo rather near to the brim would be to take it fairly easy on the old right foot. Right? No, wrong. The chap absolutely tore off into the distance, once he sense a chance to pull away. Periods of travel at such a speed were quite exhilarating, and they provided the benefit of sort of accidental air-conditioning, because of the jets of air coming through the opened windows as they cut through the night. All that was sort of okayish, although when a bus overtakes stuff, you do worry a bit. The real issue was more to do with getting down from just under the speed of sound to a flat zero – not a process that either the driver or the bus handled well. Chap just banged the anchors on with all his might, and patrons sailed throughout the bus. If you didn’t hang on tight, that was you. Babies, Grannies, pets? No one was safe. There was a very real chance of being forcibly ejected as he unexpectedly pulled into a distant lay-by to let people off the more legitimate way. As an ingénue to all this Maltese madness, I was terrified, but did my best to be strong for Mother. She looked rather less than concerned than me. The locals though? They loved it. Free fairground ride, I suppose. Utter madness. On the plus side, one got home in rather a quicker time from the capital than one had taken in getting to it. And after a time, folk got off, so it became possible to gather a seat, and a little more of a feeling of security in some of the deathlier bends.

After a while, tyres ablaze, we were turfed-out at the Hotel At The Edge of the Universe. A little embattled by the whole experience, I suggest we took a small nightcap at the bar downstairs, where we were to take breakfast the next day. After a time, the barkeep was summoned, and when asked for some local red wine, wielded one of those bottles of roughly the size of the Nebuchadnezzars or whatever they are that they give F1 drivers to spray around after the chequered flag. One harboured some suspicion as to the quality of the vintage. Rightly, as it turned out. The issue was what I can only really describe as a Red Wine Drink. Vowing to try across the road another night, we sipped all we could muster, brushed teeth a number of times and made for bed.

The bus would feature twice more, one further and more infamous evening, but I’ll come back to that.

We settled in over the next couple of days and had nothing short of a high old time of it. Plenty to do, soaked up the sun, nice food and drink. It was completely ace, and I really must take SWK one day. Did us both the power of good.

We were determined to make a couple of guided trips out, whilst we were there. On one day we plumped for a trip on a local cruise boat that took us out to neighbouring Gozo, with its awesome Azure Window, bird life, vineyards and ancient buildings. We stopped at Comino on the way back, at the very famous Blue Lagoon. Alas it turned out to be famous these days more for lager, blisteringly loud and crappy ‘pop’ music, and hordes of screaming teenagers, careering around the water on what appeared to be inflatable farming produce, tied to speedboats. Periodically they would fall in, and presumably were killed on impact and just sank to the bottom as their compadres shrieked in delight at the hedonism of it all. Who knows? Bit of Logan’s Run affair. Got to admit to being a bit British, at that point. Stayed on board with a bottle of water and a crossword. One step away from hoisting up the Argyle socks and knotting a handkerchief over my head. Not my thing, I’m afraid. Or our thing, indeed.

The other trip out was at times beautiful, and periodically studded with intense feelings of embarrassment. This one took us to the South of the main island, and out onto much smaller boats. Little inflatables, in fact, that chugged around the coast and took us to the Blue Grotto, and popped in and out of the undercut cliffs to show us all the extraordinary, phosphorescent blues of the water there. This should give you the general idea:

It was a nice enough international bunch of folk, and we were all scooped up in a minibus and whizzed around in good time to see the various sights on offer, including Qrendi, and attractive little fishing village near the boat trip. But the Grotto was the highlight, and I want to see it again one day. Fresh air, bright sun, cool water and the whizz of the outboard as we darted in and out of the rock formations. We’d been out there snapping, oohing and aahing for a while, when I chanced to look out to sea, and the island enthusiast/nerd in me spotted this, a couple of miles out:

Unusually shaped, and probably, what, a couple of miles from the coast? I had to know more about this, so tapped up our guide for some info.

“Aaaah! Eeeenglish, yes?” he boomed, cracking a grin. I signalled I was.

“Very funny story then. Island is called Fifla. It means, ‘chilli-pepper’ rock. Once it was tall and pointy like a pepper, then your RAF and Navy come and practice their shootings on it for 40 years and, hey, now is flat.”

He seemed gently amused by this. Not for the first time, I found myself looking at my flip flops, during a noticeable quiet pause in proceedings. Apparently we were still knocking the crap out of this innocent island until 1973 (!), until it was declared a nature reserve, and now the flat surface our Services generated during their assaults is populated by as many as 20,000 sea birds. So not all bad; mind you, none of the fisherman of southern Malta are allowed within a nautical mile, lest they should be blown even flatter than the island by any unexploded ordinance we might have left lying around. Rule Britannia, etc.

Our gang was out for much of the day, and by lunchtime a seaside pause saw the temperature dawdle back up into the 90s, as it did most days. No problem. Hat, bottle of water, economy of movement, and even the limpest and whitest of us can survive. However, representatives of other nations are not necessarily given to such modesty. Mother, being a Senior member of the party, was afforded a front seat in the jalopy. I was thrust into the back with the lower orders. Initially an agreeable enough ride, but when we returned to the motor in the afternoon sun, the previously shirted and shorted young Italian men I had been stationed with had done away with their clobber, dipped themselves in some sort of Vaseline and opted for a pairing of sandals and really quite reprehensible choices of budgie smugglers. Aside from the simple business of all that bulging around not doing much for the digestion, one also had to sit calf and thigh next to slippery flesh on either side. And we were rather packed in, I thought. And without seatbelts. In the event of an emergency stop I would have squeezed, slipped and popped out of the sunroof with the ease of a new-born lamb. Probably to the sound of someone making that sound involving the thumb and the inside of the cheek. The sights were great, but the journey not entirely edifying.

Two more things to tell you about, before we end this rather belated epic.

Firstly, I got the taste for something quite rare for me, on Malta. And that was a dessert. Not normally a mad dasher for the sweet trolley. Something called Cassata, we learned (Mother got outside of some of it, too). A remarkable, flattish cake featuring ricotta, green marzipan, hazelnuts, pistachios, candied fruit, sponge, vermouth, chocolate and jam. It was just wonderful, and I think I hoovered-up four big slices in five or six nights. Tried to make it since; good, but not the same. Must Go Back To Malta. I first scoffed it after getting off the bus the evening that followed the day of the events as chronicled above. As I sat there, drinking in enough sugar to bring on a seizure, I remarked to Mother at the late evening runners along the sea front. I think I might have described them as “a bit rubbish”, as they were dawdling along, rather, with the gait of those rather in a hurry for a trip to the porcelain.

I was similarly scathing of another group of well-intended runners the next night, as we went past them on yet another Night Bus Into Hell. This, too, was searing along, but on this occasion there was a little bit of drama playing out inside the bus, too. As it pulled up to take us home, and the door opened, Mother steamed past me and a number of others in pursuit of a seat. I was a bit taken aback, figured she was a bit tired and really needed to rest her plates. We’d had another full day, travelling over to Mdina, another stunning location. I loped in alongside her, holding onto the pole and the straps as our man tested out his nought to sixty time.

We both became transfixed by different things, for much of the duration of the journey. For me, it was the bizarre and slightly chilling coupling sitting opposite us. On the right, a pubescent girl of about 13. Politely dressed, a little bit of the chubbiness of childhood about her, still, with light brown skin, a pile of frizzy hair and, I recall now, a colossally large and quite out of place white leather handbag. Looked quite delighted by life, on the whole. To her right, and my left, was her ‘boyfriend’. And I use the term a bit advisedly, as he must have been the better part of my age (I was 39 at the time). He was tall, thin as a rake, and rather nerdy looking. And uncomfortable, as it was not just my incredulous eyes upon them. But, equally, he was very passive. The child was making all the running, and it was 20-odd minutes of periodic petting and coupley cooing that I would pay money to never have witnessed. But as a short film it burnt its way into the brain, rather. Unavoidable, and six feet away. The atmosphere crackled. They got off together, in the end (forgive the pun) and there was just a sort of general exhalation. Never seen anything like it in my life. Lord alone knows where they are now.

Meanwhile, Mother had found a different object of focus. Whilst I gawped in astonishment at the pairing opposite, she had set her jaw and a taught glare across the bus to the windows and the middle doors. I couldn’t really get much out of her by way of conversation, and at one stop, near Slima, she clearly followed someone with this gaze all of the way off the bus.

We got back, and were free to talk. I asked her what had raised the masterly hackles so, if not the love drama playing out in front of us. And why had she elbowed everyone else out of the way, earlier? Most unlike her.

“Oh it wasn’t everyone else”, she shared. “No, not at all. It was that Bitch from the start of the week who made us move hotel all the way out here. No way was she getting a seat.”

How we laughed. Revenge for the impropriety had come late, but was sweet.

On our final morning, I decided it was time to shift some of the Cake Weight, and so I ventured out at about 6.30am for a run in the morning light along the waterfront. And made an utter fool of myself. And ate my words of the other night. I set out at my typically foolish seven miles per hour, and must have lasted all of the first three hundred yards uphill before hitting the wall. The reason runners just bobble along in Malta is because it’s scorching hot for rather a lot of the year, and to do anything other than longer and slower running is tantamount to suicide. Idiot Brits beware.

I stuck with it, walking, wheezing, trotting, walking, sweating, and generally wrecking myself. I was overtaken by cheery pensioners. One of them waved to me. By the time I crossed the hotel lobby I was soaked to the skin. I could almost hear the drips hitting the tiled floor. I was a shocking sight, and had to double bag my kit as it went into the case. As I looked in, and prepared to pull the zip tight, I saw a little silvery flash. A necklace with a Maltese cross, which I had bought on a whim for SWK a couple of days earlier, and would present to her a little nervily on our third date in another week or so. A whole new chapter was about to begin unfolding…