In a global village, you’re not anonymous if you’re Maltese

A random taxi driver in Central America gave me a graphic description of how the Maltese man with whom he shared a cabin, on the cruise ship they both worked for in the early 1980s, used to speak. To my (carefully concealed) revulsion, it was mainly creat

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He asked me to track him down and pass on a message when I got home, but I’ve got to confess that because I had got a really bad, and probably really accurate, impression of the man in question from the taxi driver’s description, I thought it best not to. An understanding of cultural differences rarely bridges cultural barriers in these contexts, and I guessed that my taxi driver had no idea of that particular variety of people peculiar to ports in general, but more particularly to those of the ports of the Mediterranean.

In any case, forget about that. It was just my lead-in to how the world has become a pretty kind of odd global village, and being Maltese really drives this home to you. People always remember meeting a Maltese in a way that they don’t remember meeting, say, a German or a British person because there are millions of them. But meeting a Maltese is like meeting a Gibraltarian or a Hawaiian. People think it’s a little bit unusual and freaky; they remember, and worse than that, the next time they meet another Maltese, they are going to be sure to tell them.

So if you’re Maltese and chatting to random taxi drivers who want to know what your strange accent is, just say your name is Mary Borg or John Spiteri, and then say you’re from Gibraltar and hope that he doesn’t ask you what it’s like. In this case, I couldn’t – because the taxi driver had my name. So obviously, I had to hope that he wasn’t going to pick up another Maltese passenger any time soon.

Of course, all this is made worse by my propensity to treat total strangers like interview subjects, not only because I find the lives of strangers completely enthralling, but because you never know what you will find out that you wouldn’t if you didn’t ask all sorts of leading questions. Any other people with me are generally horrified at what they see as completely unacceptable curiosity, but I generally find that most people I’m talking to are only too delighted to talk about themselves and their lives, while I absolutely detest talking about myself and my life, and will determinedly deflect any attempts at getting me to do so – so it works well for both parties. They speak, prompted by my questions and occasional remarks, and I listen. I hasten to add that mine is the natural curiosity of the novelist for the details of lives and the inflections of speech, except that I am unlikely ever to write one. But you only learn about life and people by listening to them.

A couple of years ago I emerged from a tube station in London to see a Chinese massage-cum-beauty parlour right there and thought on the