I’m in Malta, we are celebrating our joint 50th this year and it’s coming up soon. Now I’ve tried to be as positive as possible in attitude about this holiday and mostly I’ve been enjoying the experience. My only problem is my always, my ever, my eternal problem, people. I don’t blame people for herding themselves towards everything that is beautiful and attractive, but the paradox created by their collective action, and the fact that it does not seem to annoy them into some realisation, really annoys me.

I go to a place because of my interest in that place, to learn or satisfy a curiosity. Maybe I am there to take in a sense-based experience, or to feel something about what that place or artifact means to me in a personal sense. I feel that being in a crowd makes that a little difficult. I am not there to say that I have been there, I am not there to impress you or to create a social media object so that it can increase my popularity. For those of us that watch live music without recording it, those of us that can watch as sunrise without streaming it, do something spectacular or dangerous just for us, give generously of our time of money without publicising that action, participate without being sponsored, I feel we have a greater right to the experience than the persons who do what they do for the above reasons.

I’m not ‘nice’ if ‘nice’ is the expected presentation of a false sentiment. We’ve established this in many earlier pieces of my writing, but I’m kind and I’m rational and I’m fair, at least in my judgement. When I say things that aren’t ‘nice’ I’m making observations about the nature of people, often not about the decisions they take. Though we cannot arrive at decisions, action, without being driven by an inner will, an agency we might call a nature.

Valletta is an old beautiful city with a long and rich history, many empires and strong city states have occupied the islands and influenced the culture. One of my favourite attributes is that they often build with a sympathy toward the styles that have existed for centuries, new blocks have a look of the old forts they’re adjacent to, keeping the city looking like history itself. I did have a moment when I visited the point at Sliema where new towers of apartments were being constructed over what appeared to be an ancient walled structure, I didn’t think that this beach front real estate was justifiably wiping away the past even though tourism and property are Malta’s main revenue source. So I can understand it.

None of that changes the fact that to get to Valletta we had to catch a bus or get a ferry, neither of these options was without its problems. The ferry is packed, and the version of queuing seen in Malta is to just push into any space and force others backwards, we happened to be the first two persons waiting for the first ferry we caught, that meant we ended up as about a hundred people back when boarding, no joke. Malta driving is the same, it’s just a matter of how cheeky you can be in pulling out first, like a game of chicken at every junction. This doesn’t seem to elicit road rage as it would in the UK. The bus was what it feels like to be a sardine in a can, I swear I have never been so intimate with a male than between the few stops. There seems to be no limit to the load capacity, whatever fits as tightly as possible is the right number.

The criticism I am making is vague I suppose, I’m trying to say that Malta is saturated in and around Valletta, saturated with tourists that almost destroy the experience. This is not unique to Malta, we saw this in Edinburgh also, and especially at the castle where we couldn’t even stop to get a picture of anything before being swamped by other visitors in a conveyor belt of mass human movement, where to stop would be to create a blockage. One felt compelled to move on constantly. I’m not saying that the experience is completely ruined, more like it is diminished, I’d learn more from the virtual tour online or from watching a Dan Snow program on the location than I would from a visit of this nature. That doesn’t mean I won’t go, it just means that I also have to watch the program.

The problem is that for these things to continue to be preserved they must take revenue, the numbers of people who visit matters. As the venue gains revenue it extends and develops the experience for the visitor, and in doing so it then needs more revenue to keep that up. This snowballs until it’s more like an interactive experience than a contemplative one, or like a theme park that entertains rather than informs. I like learning about history and how people lived, what they believed, I do not need to be entertained or be a participant. Maybe in the X-Box era there is a harder task to keep kids in awe of old things and interested in them, or maybe it’s the other way round and we drive the innovation so as to create that need, dunno.

Later, after our journeys we go to the rooftop terrace and pool. What we want from this experience is to chill out, not to compete for a space and a towel. But here again we find saturation, there is barely a square meter that does not contain a lounger and a person who really should not be showing off the many inches of bad self care their body possesses (I’m talking truly ugly overweight women here folks, I am a fattist after all). It is hard to get any sense of intimacy or the personal from these spaces that have been created by humans to please humans, I am certainly not pleased. Many times I have stated that my only wish money wise was to accumulate enough wealth that I could define my own space. I have been unsuccessful in gathering enough hay in the barn though. So to mitigate we have come up with a plan, instead of a yearly holiday with compromises we intend to save for a 5 year from now holiday with none. We want a villa with our own pool, booked restaurants, taxis, and pre-booked tickets on non busy days, and we want to see the things that are hard to get to not the stuff more normally offered to the tourists, to contemplate them in silence and solitude. It’s a plan anyways.

Paul S Wilson