View from a train

From a hotel lobby in Moscow waiting for a ride to the train station to pick up the overnight to St Petersburg. I'm on my way back to Malta and need to catch up on promises made over the past few months. The photo is a view from the dirty window of the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian. More on that and my adventures in Australia once I am back in my home base in Valletta.

On my way

I'm on my way! Waiting for the taxi to take me to the airport, then Rome, Heathrow, a week in UK, two days in Singapore and back to Australia on 5th September. I leave Malta with a curious feeling of displacement. There are too many unfinished things including my beautiful flat, my book and my unwritten blog. But I promise to spend my time in Australia productively and hope that work will continue on my flat whilst I'm gone. In the meantime, the photo is of the Moulettes busking in Republic Street, Valletta.

Promises

The photo is one of many I am taking as the sun rises over the breakwater. I will post soon on Malta Arts Festival and the arches that are taking shape in my flat. In the meantime, I have to prepare my lessons for next week!

Water on the block

Water is a precious commodity in Malta yet we are depleting the aquifer as though it is fed from a bottomless tank in the sky.

I guesstimate that there are 142 households in my large block of flats and each of us has at least two tanks on the roof, one for the kitchen and one for the bathroom. The tanks are replenished regularly and mysteriously by the government who then send irregular bills for large amounts of money. Everybody complains.

When I first arrived in Malta, I struggled to find my way in a new country with a very different culture. My neighbour was very helpful in helping me to switch on my water and he told me which of the many tanks on the roof were mine. I wrote it down on a bit of paper and forgot about it.

More recently I have begun to feel sufficiently at home to start wondering about things and explore beyond the feeble water pressure in the shower. I discovered a few things.

The first revelation came when I was investigating strange dragging sounds on my roof. It was the man from Melita who was busily dropping more cables down the front of the block to connect a new household on a lower floor to one of the many satellite dishes that mushroom around the water tanks. I learnt from him that if I wanted to get rid of any of the cables or disks or antennae, I should ring the office. His job was just to connect people, not make sense of the rivers of cables that snake all over the roof parapets.

He got on with his job. That was how I made my first discovery. His job appeared to be associated with the mysterious small box I had noticed near to my washroom on the roof. He had to connect the cable that he had dropped down the front of the flats to this box which was at the back. He did this by running the cable along the rusty iron beams that support four bathroom water tanks including mine.

My interest was aroused. I worked out which tank was mine by tracing the pipe down the service well to the bathroom wall on my level. Discovery number one, my tank was missing a lid. A small portion of fibre glass hung on one of the lid ties but where the rest of it had gone was impossible to fathom.

Now I had a specific problem to address. Where do I find water tank lids in Valletta and how do I get them onto my roof and then onto my tank? So I asked my hairdresser. He sent me to an ironmonger on the Marsamxetto side of Valletta.

"What size is it?" asked the ironmonger, "I only have big ones."

He advised me to go and measure the tank across the diameter of the top. This was a good opportunity to get to know about my water tanks, to become familiar with the dimensions of the problem.

I returned to the roof, calling into my flat on the way to pick up my steel measuring tape and incidentally discovering the scrappy bit of paper on which I had noted the whereabouts of my tanks according to my neighbour. It seems I have three tanks, one for the bathroom and two for the kitchen. At least they all look the same size.

Gingerly I climb on a table that was left on the roof when I arrived. It is the same table that caused the original dragging sounds that led me to investigate the Melita man. Now I am armed with measurements and I return to the ironmonger.

"That's a 500 litre tank," says he, "I don't have any. Maybe next week but if you can find someone else..."

Over the next few weeks, whenever I remember, I call into any ironmonger I happen to be passing and ask them about lids for 500 litre water tanks. No-one has one. The closest I get is when a woman says "Call back this afternoon when my husband will be here."

In the meantime, I have begun to investigate the other two tanks. I discover that I have two tanks for the kitchen because the large family that lived here before me did a lot of washing. I also realise with horror that I am leaking and have been for a long time judging by the green slime sitting in the corner of the lift shaft next to my tanks.

I scurry to my neighbour. She sends me to one of the ironmongers. He lives in my block. He gives me the phone number of a plumber. I phone the plumber and he says he will come round the next day, Saturday.

I am thrilled that I seem to be solving this problem so easily. I wait at home at the appointed time. When he doesn't turn up, I phone his number. His wife tells me he came but he couldn't find my door. A Maltese friend tells me the World Cup is on. I try and reframe it in a positive light but I can't block out my obsession with all the water I have wasted through evaporation from a lidless tank and dripping from a leaky one.

On Monday the plumber comes right on the allotted time. We go onto the roof to investigate. He is happy to explain to me what he is doing so that I can get to understand my water system. The leak is solved with worrying alacrity by adjusting the stop cock inside the tank. The lid will have to wait until tomorrow.

The next day, we discover that the leak is still leaking and it is from a hairline crack at the bottom of the tank. We ponder this issue as the lid is put on the bathroom tank.

"I don't really need two tanks for the kitchen."

He looks at me to make sure I mean what I'm saying. Then he beams as he works out how to get rid of the leaking tank and give me one good kitchen tank. I leave him to get on with the heavy plumbing stuff. I return when he is cutting up the old tank to take it away. I feel almost euphoric at the small extra bit of sky I can now see where the old tank used to be. The smallish fee seems very reasonable to have all my plumbing problems solved.

The next day I pop up on the roof to bask in the glory of my drip-free tanks. The slimy area is still damp and there is a glisten of water on the pipe above the new stop handle he has put in. I almost cry with disappointment. I phone. He will come tomorrow around midday. He comes a few hours earlier. In no time he has whipped out the offending bit of pipe and attached the stop handle at a different angle. And this time it seems to be fixed even though the pipe juts out against the Valletta skyline where the old tank used to sit.

I now have an urge to run up onto the roof and check! The photo is of the bouganvillea at the old Birkirkara train station.

Everyday Valletta

This is an installation by Sabrina Calleja Jackson down on the Valletta waterfront. A large unused space opposite the cruise terminal has been taken over by a group of artists. I want to write something about how the everyday becomes extraordinary here in Valletta.

I have a friend visiting me from Australia via UK. I am enjoying showing her some of the quiet treasures of Malta. Last night we walked over to Msida for the festival and watched as young men ran up a steep greasy pole to try and grab a flag from the end.

This morning we went to see the new 35 minute movie about Valletta that opened at the Embassy cinema complex earlier this week. Apart from the hype of the launch, I suspect we may have been the first people to pay to go to the show and my friend was certainly the first person to buy something at the small shop in the foyer that has been set up to accompany "the experience".

The movie makes good use of Valletta's historic location as well as Malta's fascination with reenactments. My friend loved it and I thought it was a fine way to get a potted history of what makes Valletta what it is today.

There are still teething problems to iron out. We arrived for the first show of the day and I was surprised at the cost (almost E10 with no KartAnzjan concessions). Sadly, I don't think many Maltese people will go along to a show that costs more than a full length feature film. This is a pity. It seems to me that the most successful "tourist" attractions here are those that also draw local people.

We were the only people there. We waited in the foyer whilst they prepared the auditorium and a young man explained to us how to use the headphones. We chose our seats in splendid isolation, inserted our earpieces and then spent the first ten minutes of the show trying to make them work. Finally, in desperation we attracted the attention of the projectionist and after fiddling with it for a while he took my set away to try and solve the problem. Once we had sound we enjoyed the remaining history and were then invited to watch the first 10 minutes again. This time we didn't need to use headphones, and I enjoyed it much more.

Afterwards, my friend browsed the small tourist shop that has good quality souvenirs. When she came to purchase a small glass Maltese cross, the delightful young man behind the counter couldn't get the new till to open. After valiant phone calls and charming comments of "This is Malta" variety on his part to try and lighten the situation, he finally resolved the issue of change by digging in his own pocket. The film is about the courage, persistence, resilience and openness to change of the Maltese people and he certainly showed those qualities in full!

In my next post, I want to tell the story of my water tank.

Seeking Anna Vella

This is a photo of my grandfather's school. The chalk board in front, held by two of my mum's sisters, reads McKay's High Schools, Cospicua and Hamrun. My mother is the little girl standing in the middle between my grandmother and my grandfather. My cousin and I worked out that it must have been taken around 1920 and if you look carefully you can see how someone in the intervening years has put numbers on all the McKay children down to my mother who is number 7. Number 8, the baby of the family, my auntie Anne, doesn't seem to be in the picture.

This week I followed up on the family history research undertaken by my cousin Alison, who now lives in France. She is the daughter of number 8. Armed with my grandmother's family tree showing that three generations of Vellas before my great grandfather were married in San Paulo church, Valletta, I called in to see the parish priest.

My cousin had told me that the parish priest would be in his office on Tuesdays and Thursdays and that he looked after the records going back centuries.

I worked out that St Paul's church must be the one on St Paul's street but when I found the church closed and a sign advising tourists that it was worth visiting St Paul Shipwrecked church around the corner I started to feel confused. I wandered in the general direction of the stepped street going up to St Paul Shipwrecked and was rewarded after a few paces by a small, open door with a sign announcing the parish office. A man with a crucifix was just coming down the stairs as though he was on a mission but when he spotted me he asked if I needed help. I waved my family tree and mumbled about living in Valletta.

"You need Father Vincent," he said and pointed me up the stairs.

At the top there was a tiny office with a man sitting at a table carefully copying something from a book. He looked up and I started to explain what I wanted. He indicated for me to sit in a chair and continued with his task. I have learnt that in Malta, when you go into an office, you have to wait until the person behind the desk turns their attention to you. Sometimes this takes a long time. I looked around at the paintings on the wall, one of which seemed to be of the man behind the desk but dressed up in purple. On two other walls behind the table there were khaki metal cupboards like standard issue British bureaucracy.

This time it was only a few minutes until parish priest Vincent Borg looked up from his writing and invited my story. I told him about the family tree.

"So what do you want?"

"I don't really know. I think maybe I just want to see the marriage certificates of these three," I said pointing to the three boxes with dates going back to 1753, all married in Valletta (San Paulo).

Father Vincent looked at my piece of paper. Without saying anything he swiveled in his chair and opened one of the cupboards to reveal shelves full of large, aged books that looked as though they had been used in a Harry Potter movie. He glanced back at my paper and selected one of the books to place on his desk. He opened the tatty brownish cover to reveal pages of spidery black writing. He turned a few pages in the same way that I would look up a word in a dictionary. He explained to me that the dates were at the top of each page and the names of the people were down the side.

"Here it is," he announced. His voice was matter-of-fact. He had chosen the middle date, 1786, the wedding of Gio-Maria Vella and Rosa Xuereb who were married on my birthday. More than 200 years before, somebody, perhaps looking rather like Father Vincent, had carefully written in Latin the details of their wedding: the people who had been witnesses, the parentage of the contracting parties, the officiating minister. I stared at the hand that had recorded my genetic line.

"What do you want to do?" asked Father Vincent.

"Can I have a copy?" I managed.

He reached into a drawer and drew out a small form. I expected him to bite the end of his pen as he began to scan the document and pick out the relevant details to record on the form. There didn't seem to be anything I could do so I looked away and up at the portraits on the walls.

"That's me," said Father Vincent, catching the direction of my glance as he continued writing.

"Oh. I don't suppose I could get a photocopy, could I?"

"No, the book would fall apart."

Silence again as he continued bending to his task.

"Could I take a photo?"

"Yes, that would be OK."

I felt a surge of elation as I got out my camera and tried to work out the most unobtrusive way of getting round the table to take a photo of the page he was working on.

"Yes, come round because I'll close it soon," said Father Vincent. I carefully sidled between the table and the wall and positioned the camera for the shot. The book was closed as I went back to my chair.

"So there were two more, I think," said Father Vincent as he carefully replaced the book on the shelf. He looked again at my page of family history. Another book was selected and opened. Different writing but the same cursive recording of dates and names. This time Father Vincent looked puzzled. He looked back at my paper, then back at the book, then back and forth a few pages. This was the earliest of my ancestors marriages, Giuseppe Vella and Carmela Monti. Finally he opened another cupboard and reached up for another ancient book. This one was like an index.

"You see I can't find it." Back to the paper, back to the index, back to the book, pages were turned. As he works, Father Vincent has started to make conversation now. He asks me where I was born.

"Ah, here it is, the date was wrong, a typing error." My paper said 1753 and my ancestors were actually married in 1763. Father Vincent started copying out the extract and I prepared for the photo. By now, I felt confident enough to ask if I could take a picture of him pouring over the books and he seemed quite happy with that.

The most recent wedding in San Paulo church (1827), Giovanni Vella and Rosalea Sammut, was easy to find and by now we had the photography down to a fine art even though this entry went over two pages so I had to photograph the whole opened book. By now I was beginning to worry about how I should offer to pay for this amazing recording that had been going on for centuries. I mumbled an enquiry.

Father Vincent handed me three small sheets of Extracts from the Marriages' Records held in the Collegiate and Parish Church of St Paul Shipwrecked - Valletta.

"There's the offering box," he said indicating a small wooden box fixed to the wall.

"And perhaps we will see you in church," added Father Vincent, "or do you go to the Scottish church?" He had taken his glasses off.

I turned from putting some money into the slot of the offering box, hesitating.

"Actually, I don't really go to church."

"Well, start going, go to church," said Father Vincent with a little smile as I went out of his magical office.

This is a dunny!

The photo was taken at Popeye's village at Anchor bay to the north of Malta. It was taken when I visited for the first time with my 8 year old niece. The theme park emerged from the specially constructed set used for the making of the movie of Popeye. My niece loved it and I appreciated the quirky village buildings and the dramatic setting. There was a strong wind blowing into the bay that day so the floating water features weren't in use and I could see why the breakwater constructed for the making of the movie is already breaking up.

In Australia, dunny is the term for an outside toilet. This setting makes it an extreme example!

This post is just a promise. I have neglected the blog this month as my life has taken over and I have been enjoying visitors. As soon as I organise my thoughts I'll catch up. I'm aware that I still haven't told the story of our walking trip to Liguria and there is so much happening in Malta that I want to write about.

Walking the line

The railway line in Malta was inaugurated in 1883 and carried passengers between Valletta and Mtarfa on the northern side of the ancient city of Mdina. It was never a huge success financially and was forfeited to the government in 1890, extended northwards with a half mile tunnel built under Mdina by the British in 1896 and then finally closed in 1931. What remain are some additions to the secret underground spaces of Valletta, remnants of bridges and embankments scattered between the two old cities, stations at Hamrun, Birkirkara, Rabat and Mtarfa, some unusually straight sections of road where the old lines used to run and the beautifully constructed circular tunnel under Mdina that is now used as a mushroom farm.

On Sunday, Malta Geographic organised a walk/coach trip tracing the route of the railway from Valletta to Mtarfa. We met at the old ruins of the Opera house where I was surprised to discover that the old train station was actually located at the side of what will become an open air piazza/theatre in the reworking of the entrance to Valletta. The new Parliament building will be sited over the station where people used to descend into the underground tunnel to board the train at the start of the line. What a great opportunity for park and ride into the capital to attend cultural events!

We walked out through City gate and across the bridge entrance so that we could look down into the ditch on the left hand side. Here we could see where the train used to exit the tunnel from the ramparts of the city, crossed a bridge and re-entered another tunnel on the other side. Already, everyone in the group was buzzing at the possibilities presented by this century old construction. How will the beautifully arched stone railway bridge be used in Renzo Piano's designs for the new entrance to the city?

We followed the line of the tunnel across the bus terminus and along the footpath by the side of the granaries. Here there are gratings that used to serve as ventilation shafts for the tunnel after they had first been used in construction. At one point near the granaries, the tunnel builders discovered an underground water storeage system and had to detour slightly to the right. This got us thinking about the juxtaposition of the underground storeage system for grain, the aquaduct bringing water to the city that someone suggested finished at an unmarked fountain in the linear park next to the granaries and the transit tunnel for the railway. Is the whole complex system mapped somewhere?

Near the Argotti Gardens, we observed the ramp down to the Floriana station site and found our way down to the Filippo Neri Garden, one of the hidden gardens nestled into the ramparts in Valletta and Floriana. Looking over the rampart walls at the far side we discovered where the tunnel exited the underground shaft and crossed the ditch to re-enter the ramparts. Re-tracing our steps to Port-de-Bombes we could see this from ground level as well as discover where the train re-emerged again to cross another neat small bridge. This is the photo that I've used to head up this post. At this point, everyone was dreaming about walking/cycling routes into Valletta using the old railway tunnels.

From there we followed the busy main road from Valletta to Hamrun. This parallels the old railway that ran over ground from Port-de-Bombes until the tunnel under Mdina. I was getting excited now but for a more personal reason. My mother used to talk about family walks from Valletta to Hamrun when she was a little girl. We were probably walking in her footsteps. Sure enough, we passed the old Lyceum building in Hamrun where my grandfather used to teach.

Just round the corner, we found the old Hamrun station now used by the scouts. The station here is almost intact including the old corrugated iron platform cover. Inside there are framed photos of the old railway and outside there is a stack of old rails. For the first time, here we noticed how mature trees often mark the route of the old railway.

Now we picked up the coach for the section to Birkirkarra. I have already visited that station with a tour of Birkirkarra run by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, so the station, with it's park and old carriage were familiar. I have used the photo of the third class carriage in my post about the conference on Communicating Poverty. What was stunning at this time of year was the display of bouganvilleas all down one side of the park and once again, the mature trees running along the side of the track. I'll use that photo in another post soon!

On to Corinthia near San Anton gardens where we walked along the railway embankment up to the site of the Attard Station. At this stage, I was enjoying how the trip was helping me to link up odd bits of information that have been crowding into my head since I started to explore this amazing island that is now my home. Some time ago I read a snippet in the paper about how a local council was trying to get rid of a colony of cats that had established themselves in a local park supported by a local eccentric. The sign outside the little park at the start of this section of the walk banned several things including cats. Yet inside there were several cats as well as cat kennels, feeding basins and a woman going round filling the bowls with water. I hear an expression almost every day here: "Only in Malta" It is an expression of loving exasperation.

Now our guide, Frans Attard, who had done a wonderful job of getting together our programme and guiding us along the route with the help of his grandson, started to become mysterious. The plan was to drive along Triq il-Linja (Street of the line) to Mdina road where we would walk up to the Rabat station. There was now a slight change of plan and we were to go to the end of the line at Mtarfa for a reason that he would explain later.

The Notabile tunnel had been built under Mdina by the British in order to service the troops' barracks and hospital at Mtarfa. If this seems like an extravagance, it also opened the railway line for further expansion to the north of the island. We stopped at the lovely old bridge across the valley that is now used by the little road train that circumnavigates Mdina and walked up to an old railway building that has been used as a restaurant but is now planned as a railway museum. Here we could see the exit from the tunnel but it was closed and gated. People were starting to wonder why we were hanging about here and some were even starting to make their excuses to leave the group and head home. When an old car drove up the road and through the group, I just assumed it was normal traffic, but in fact it was the mushroom farmer who had arrived to open up the tunnel for us. The mystery was solved!

For many people this was the highlight of the trip. We were able to walk in through part of the tunnel and learn something about the process of growing mushrooms. We even got to see the remarkable circular tunnel construction that needed to be put in place at this section under Mdina because it went through the blue clay that is under the globigerina limestone of Malta's geology.

After that, the walk back from the station at the other side of Mdina through the fields was almost an anti-climax although I enjoyed the evening stroll. It had been a long day and we didn't get back to Valletta until after half past seven. I was due at Manoel theatre at that time to see the contemporary dance performance of "Being Caravaggio" but by the time I'd raced home for my ticket and back to the theatre I only managed to catch the final half hour of the show. But at least I was alone in the gallery with my walking boots on! And my internal map of Malta now includes a bit of an idea of where the old railway used to run.

Stuck in the lift

It had to happen. After locking myself out and worrying about getting stuck in the lift, I did. It is not a good place to be stuck. It happened on the sixth floor after thinking about things for a while on the seventh. I was on my way home from Manoel theatre and the enjoyment I always get from walking back at night through St George square kept me from even having a twinge of anxiety when I got into the lift. Another person got in on the same floor and he got out alright on the fifth but the ancient mechanism must have got confused between the fifth and the seventh and decided to split the difference and shut down on the sixth. I shocked myself with my initial surge of panic. Luckily, the light stayed on so I was able to look at the array of buttons and realise that the only way of letting people know I was stuck was to ring the bell. So I did - twice and for a long time.

After a while, I heard male voices talking in Maltese. When they realised it was the English woman trapped inside they asked "Are you alright?"

"No, I'm not alright, I'm stuck in a lift."

There were strange scrabbling and scratching noises outside that seemed to go on for a long time. After a while when it became obvious that the feeble scratching wasn't going to make a difference and we had worked out that I was on the sixth floor and the liftman would not come until Monday (it was Saturday night), I suggested they go upstairs and fetch my neighbour because he had experience of getting women out of lifts since his daughter had met a similar fate a few weeks before. I have a lot of confidence in my neighbour. He says very little and persists in working through possible solutions until he manages to solve whatever the problem might be.

Sure enough, after a little bit of grunting and banging, the fingers of two hands appeared on the edge of the lift door. Another two hands were inserted higher up and there was a lot of heaving to make a two inch gap but then no more. So I added my hands to the collective effort and pulled from my side. It gave enough for my neighbour to wedge himself in the partly open door and hold it open long enough for me to jump over him and into the arms of the two young men who had heard the initial bell ringing and come out to help. I was saved!

I tell myself that walking up and down seven flights of stairs is good exercise. Even after the lift man came on Monday morning and fixed it, I had determined that I was going to carry on using the stairs but my resolve has waned as people gently told me in passing that the lift was fixed now. I guess I have to live with an unpredictable lift and trust my neighbour.

The photo is of graffiti in the old prison museum in Rabat, Gozo. The technique is different from Australian Aboriginal hand painting which uses blown paint to outline the hand. On the soft globigerina limestone used in Malta and Gozo, it is easy to scratch the outline into the wall. But the idea of affirming identity by outlining your own hand is perhaps universal. Maybe I'll suggest that everyone who gets stuck in the lift should leave their handprint.

On hearing Robin Robertson

Last night I heard a poet read

He read of drink and sex and death

He read of Aberdeen

Grandfather came from Aberdeen

His Maltese wife birthed not four seals

But she who mothered me

Grandfather's bones lie with his wife

In a Maltese charnel house

My mother lies in a Scottish grave

Atop her ain true love

The poet's words dug up the dead

And flung their bones into my days

He flashed his words and stopped my blood

With rags of torn lost love

Haunting words removed from joy

Jarred by the ring of a mobile phone

Delivered stark in lectern light

Finished with wine and brittle chat

But I didn't stay for that

You know you're home when...

Spring has arrived in Malta and I am into barefoot mode. The sun in the mornings has moved round enough to shine on my front windows for a few hours and the warmth wakes me up like a hibernating tortoise. But it also means that I can't read the screen on my laptop where it is set up by the window. I have to put a sun hat on to stop my glasses going too dark!

To really be at home somewhere, you have to spend several seasons there and learn to deal with the different conditions. Last week was windy and I just had my back courtyard windows open. On Wednesday afternoon when I got back from my lace class in Marsaxlokk, I called round to my neighbour to give her some old magazines from the newspaper. We chatted about her grandsons. The wind blew the door shut. We both stared in complete silence as we contemplated the implications of being outside the door in my socks (it was still cool then) without a key. This eventuality had crossed my mind before and I thought I must do something in preparation but of course I hadn't taken any action. We dismissed some of the wilder solutions like abseiling down from the roof. Solutions from another world such as phoning a locksmith were dismissed by my neighbour. It seems that in Malta, locksmiths don't sit on the phone in the afternoons waiting for distress calls from old ladies. In the end, my neighbour woke up her husband who was having his afternoon nap and he spent an hour and a half forcing my lock. My door now looks bedraggled but I can still lock it by turning the bolt into the top and bottom of the door rather than into the side which is stuffed. I have learnt always to have a key with me if I poke my head out of the door and I will make arrangements for a spare key to be left somewhere.

The photo is of a front door in Birkirkara that is completely covered in squashed Heineken beer cans. I may have to find a similar solution for my front door.

Last night the International Fireworks festival started on Grand Harbour. I watched from the roof. Like band clubs, fireworks in Malta are competitive. The fireworks are made at local village factories by volunteers and every year someone is killed in an explosion somewhere. At the festival, the displays are set up on barges moored off Kalkara. There were five of them last night with at least one overseas guest display. Everyone gathered along the bastions or came in boats to watch. I have never seen fireworks so close up and it was stunning. I took up a glass of wine and felt my brain exploding with the noise, the bursting patterns of light and the smoke. After the second barge finished, I noticed flame starting in the stern and sure enough, there was a long pause in proceedings as small boats investigated and a tug was dispatched to pump water onto the blaze.

Today the lift is out of action again. Last night, my neighbour's daughter got stuck in it. Awful thought that I will have to deal with!

In Cuba

The small boats are gathering in the harbour to escort the pope across Grand Harbour from Kalkara creek. He is scheduled to meet Malta's young people at the Valletta waterfront during the next hour. I will go up onto my roof to see what I can. All of Malta it seems has turned out to catch a glimpse of the pontiff as he rides in his popemobile through the streets, or appears in balconies or on specially constructed stages.

I just wanted to get this post started - I have been promising it for months! Malta's weekend fete for the pope has got me thinking about it. When Fidel Castro ousted the dictator Batista to move his country towards post-colonial independence, he recognised the importance of the catholic religion for Cuban people and he did not try to use force to eradicate the church. It makes Cuba into a fascinating island of contrasts where church and state are separate and warily tolerated. In Havana, we even stayed in a hotel run by nuns in their convent. The photo is a street scene in Havana.

Thursday. I've just got back from the lunchtime concert at St Catherine of Italy. This evening I'll go down to Valletta Waterfront for the University Wind Ensemble playing at Sagrestia Vault. Sometimes my life becomes too crowded to fit in my writing.

But Cuba has become part of my life now. I am reading a fat book called "In conversation with Fidel" by Ignacio Ramonet. Ramonet suggests that Cuba cannot be dismissed as a quaint anomaly, an outdated and fading remnant of a communist era. Today, old man Castro remains an inspiring leader of radical resistance to globalisation. In this scenario, identification with a unique local culture is enriched and empowered by an awareness of the interconnection of all local contexts in a global network. I would like to think that old people in general may be part of the radical resistance to globalisation. Malta is my new base, my beloved and respected "local", yet I remain connected to and concerned about the global forces that shape our lives. In a small way, perhaps I can use the freedom of privileged old age to make life a little better for some of the other people who share this globe at this point in time.

One of the ways we tried to do this when the Brisbane Combined Unions choir started planning our trip with the Australian Union Singers to the International Choral Festival in Santiago in Cuba was to invite everyone to carry with them small gifts like toiletries, educational and medical supplies. We were advised that giving individual gifts was frowned upon but that we could donate to organisations who would distribute among their networks. In fact it wasn't as easy as this. When we arrived, we gathered all the gifts together, made a list of everything and tried to locate the appropriate bodies to receive the considerable piles of items. We would have liked to sing in a hospital and a school as a marker of our gifts, but it just became too complicated to coordinate such a process. After a lot of democratic debate on our part about what we should do, we just ended up giving everything to the organisers of the festival, together with the list of items in the hope that they would be able to distribute appropriately. I realised then how real is the issue of re-distribution of resources. We were trying to act in an immediate context transferring a tiny amount of resources from one local to another and we couldn't really negotiate a satisfying way to do it. That experience must be magnified enormously by the huge amounts of aid being shuttled around the globe between governments and NGOs.

So many levels to discover in Cuba! Perhaps that is why I have put off writing this blog. At the tourist level, Havana is fascinating and deserves weeks of wandering the streets and visiting the galleries and monuments; Santiago's history as a birthplace of the revolution merits more time than we were able to give and the countryside, the sea and mountains call me back; the old cars and buses and motorbikes are iconic; there really is music all the time in the streets and bars. Mohitos, the national drink with rum and mint, became a daily ritual and that reminds me that the mint I am growing in a pot on my kitchen windowsill is now prolific and if I get some rum and look up the mohito recipe, I could resurrect that ritual from time to time!

The focus for us, of course, was the music. For eight days in Santiago we fitted in the tourist visits to the beach and to the sights around our daily rehearsals and performances. Our hotel was right in the centre and overlooked the busy central square. From the rooftop terrace where we had breakfast, we looked across at the bell tower of the cathedral and beyond that to the river. The hotel management found us a room to use as our base and here we met every day to rehearse and plan our schedule. Sometimes it was very hot but everyone managed to keep their shirts on both literally and metaphorically. Our performances were well received although they were very different to the Cuban presentations. In Cuba, the choirs are professional with choristers selected at a young age to make music their lives. The choirs sang beautiful, polyphonic music and presented themselves in formal costumes. Our choir are all volunteers who sing rousing tales about social justice. We are used to singing with gusto outdoors at rallies and on picket lines. So it was not a surprise when the founder director of the festival, a man in his 80s who taught us a song and conducted us when we sang at the music school, said to our base section that we would sing more beautifully if we sang more softly!

On a personal level, Cuba will always be spending three days with my sister and my nephew. My sister travelled from California and my nephew from New York to meet us in Santiago. It was difficult for them to get there because of the USA embargo on its citizens visiting Cuba so they came via Mexico. They had never met my choir before yet they agreed not only to come to Cuba but also to act as interpreter/MC and official photographer for the choir. My sister has been learning Spanish for a few years and my nephew would like to be a full-time photographer. Cuba has become a memorable node in my global network and I will treasure the memory of my sister standing on stage in front of a huge Spanish-speaking audience and daring to address them in their own language, of my nephew flashing his camera with great joy as we nervously undertook our first sound check. Today my nephew has his first exhibition in a NY gallery and I am so glad to have a link with his achievement in another part of the globe. I hope he continues to flash his camera all over the world!

"Communicating Poverty"

The conference, "Communicating Poverty", was held in the plush surroundings of the Excelsior Hotel in Floriana, looking out on the maxi yachts moored at Manoel Island. The project, Media Engagement in Development Issues and Promotion (MEDIP), was a collaborative project between Malta, Hungary, Cyprus, Estonia, Slovenia and Romania, all recent members of EU. It was about media coverage of issues of poverty. As one delegate put it, "How do you make poverty sexy?"

I went along on Saturday because I had been to a previous conference last year in St George's bay where I heard for the first time of the EU millennium goals addressing issues of poverty. I was interested in what appeared to be one project's outcome in the lead-up to the target year of 2015. The objective of the MEDIP project is to enhance the contribution of the participating six new EU member states towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The strategy is to sensitise journalists and the media to these goals. I haven't yet seen today's papers but I found nothing about the conference in Sunday's papers although I had previously found out that it was happening from an advertisement in the print media. I discovered that part of the project included a training workshop for mainstream media held in Malta in March last year. With hindsight, I think I may have noticed a change in the language used by the media to report on issues of poverty. For example, most articles use the term "irregular" rather than "illegal" to report on the people who are currently in Malta without standard documentation.

The conference was organised in two similar sessions each starting with a lecture presentation. This was followed by the screening of one of the 30 minute documentaries made by contributing countries after a trip to Uganda, and the session finished up with a panel discussion. Each of the six participating states has made a video focussing on different millennium goals. Malta's contribution looked at maternal health in Uganda and the other video screened was made by Hungary and examined issues of gender equality. Discussion centred on positive versus negative coverage. Poverty is grey, grinding and long-term rather than dramatic, sudden and emotional. It is difficult to portray the factual information in a way that creates hope and dignity for the people involved as well as maintaining interest by a Western audience already distanced by geography and experience.

One of the ways forward is for the media to help bridge this distance between audience and the people involved. The MEDIP project sought to achieve this geographically by taking the media to the issue in Uganda to make the videos. Another bridge is to enable a Western audience in examining their own experience to reveal how it impacts on global poverty. A good example cited at the conference was the British TV series where young fashion-conscious people were transported to one of the sites in India where their garments were made. They were required to live the life of a worker in that situation and the subsequent excellent documentary was about that experience.

Poverty as a global issue was discussed at the conference but in terms of avoiding the trap of competitive poverty where people seek to claim greater poverty than their neighbour. There wasn't time, although it was hinted at, to discuss how Western behaviour contributes to global poverty.

Another way to bridge the experience gap is to tap in to the stories of people who have come to Malta from other lands seeking to escape poverty. Academic, Teresa Hanley, emphasised this bridging point in her talk but again there wasn't time to discuss further. It was also touched upon in the introductory lecture by Mr Bouratsis, a director of EuropeAid, when he pointed out that EU sends a lot of aid outside of Europe because their policy is not to close off to the rest of the world. The EU is not a fortress protected in times of internal hardship from seeing how that hardship is linked to the wider world.

The photo that heads up this post was taken yesterday when I went on the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts tour of Birkirkara. It is one of the carriages from the train that ran briefly from Mdina to Valletta at the turn of C20 until 1930s. It went bankrupt reportedly because they collected the fares at the end of the trip when the train arrived in Valletta so people used to get off at the stop before and walk in! Ironically, the conference finished with a sumptuous buffet lunch with multiple courses and wine. I felt guilty about enjoying such a free lunch at a conference on poverty so this article is my contribution!

Living in Valletta

My current life takes over from my past. Yesterday I went to a conference called 'The historic city: a reference model for urban sustainable development policies' hosted by the International committee on Historic Towns and Villages. It was held in the Auberge de Provence which is now the archaeology museum in Republic street. The photo shows the PM, the chair of Heritage Malta and the president of CIVVIH (from right to left) dwarfed by the magnificent painting in the hall that we were in.

I stayed for the whole day sitting through rather dull presentations where people put up big chunks of text (sometimes from their own publications) and proceeded to read the words out loud. But I thought a lot about where I have come from and where I am now. Most of the participants were architects and town planners who have now started to talk about the fourth pillar of sustainability - culture (alongside heritage, economic and social). Community cultural development in Australia adopted this idea as a cornerstone of praxis many years ago yet there were no representatives of this area or of community arts at the conference. In fact, there were very few Maltese people in general even though the president of CIVVIH is Maltese.

The significance of the social in sustaining the vibrancy of cities was also discussed. The general trend of people moving out of the historic parts of cities and the subsequent gentrification was raised. In Valletta the population has dropped from something like 25,000 at the time of the knights to a mere 6,500 now. I felt privileged to be one of that small band of people tal belt (from Valletta). I started to think about how I might link my past work in community cultural development with my current life in this historic city. It is curious that my last two posts on this site have been about my growing love for my adopted home.

The other idea that came up often and resonated with me was the proposition that conservation is about the past and sustainability is about thinking of the future whilst living now. This is the continuing theme of my life today as I learn how to live well in old age. I'm off now for coffee with a friend!

Home again and writing

Easter has been solitary and reflective. The mood was set on Maundy Thursday when I went to the lunchtime concert at St Catherine of Italy - beautiful songs accompanied by piano for the stations of the cross. But the readings in between each piece gave the performance meaning for me. The performers had carefully chosen poems and writing about some of the horrors that we have perpetrated on each other during the past century. In the past week, I have picked up from two different sources the proposition that Malta's history has been about service. In the past it has been the service of other people's power struggles. Malta's independent future now lies in the service of peace. It is a seductive idea for an old woman who has chosen this small central turning point of the Mediterranean as my home.

The Good Friday procession was interrupted by an island-wide power cut. The final station had just passed me in my position at the top of the hill in St Paul's street. The rhythmic creaking of the carrying poles was stopped as the penitents in their light brown robes reached the top and put down their heavy load on the resting stays. When the power went off, there was literally an electric pause as everyone tried to work out what had suddenly happened to plunge us all into darkness. I walked down along the side of the procession to head to my flat to make dinner, but when I realised the power was off I decided I couldn't face the many flights of steps with lift and lights out of action. I wandered through the Valletta streets where people had started to light candles and put on car headlamps to help the procession get moving again. At the restaurants I passed anxious workers standing in the doorways trying to get an idea of how long the cut might last. Of course, they could not cook food. I ended up in upper Valletta in the cafe at St James Cavalier. They were the only place in Valletta to have power, probably because they have their back to Castille where the PM's office is. I went in for seafood risotto washed down with half a bottle of Maltese wine and finished off with hot chocolate.

At 9.30, the power was still off but I was sufficiently fortified to face the climb up to my flat using the tiny torch on my key ring to light the way.

The rest of Easter I have spent getting back into my writing, unpacking the last of my boxes from Australia and setting up my office space with all my reference books around me. On Sunday, I also went to the Adoloratto cemetery to see if I could find the two plots where my grandparents were buried. I had been given two plot numbers by a very helpful government employee suggested by a friend (thanks, Reno) but it was quite difficult to work out where they were. The cemetery is beautiful, set on a hillside with lots of established trees and the amazing baroque tombs and chapels in the private sections. I wandered vaguely, using the sun to head in a Westerly direction which was where the government plots were located as indicated by the numbers that I was carrying scribbled on a piece of paper. After a while I realised that some of the terrace walls had letters on them and then at the back of the cemetery I noticed that the grave sites had multiple marble plaques on each and these seemed to be temporary. The plots had numbers on them and I eventually found my grandparents in the same row, but not side by side. As in most rocky lands with limited space, Malta routinely clears government graves every ten years and places the remains in a charnel. I couldn't identify the charnel house but I will return during office hours and try to find out more about what I can do to commemorate the place where my ancestors are buried.

The photo that heads the post is of an ancient apiary carved into the garigue at Xemxija that I visited with Ramblers Malta in January. The smaller holes are for the bees to store their honey. The larger hole is where the beekeeper went in to collect it. It seems that the more I write, the more I have to write. Now I have lined up for my next posts the venture in Cuba last year, my trips to UK and Liguria in Italy last month and the visit by my brother last week. Until my next post...

From my window

The twin breakwaters of Grand Harbour embrace me like the arms of a final lover.

I feel the pulse of Valletta snuggled at my back, breathing softly in my ear.

He speaks to me, this city built by gentlemen for gentlemen,

this city of straight masculine lines and defensive bastions,

this city of baroque excess.

I am the soft, rounded shapes of the goddess temples,

more ancient than the knights' city,

trampled by the knights' religion,

reborn in Valletta chapels as virgin mother and martyred saint.

Yet his soft breathing enchants me and his encircling arms merge with my own arms.

Red and green candles flicker in my hands,

guiding ships to the safe harbour that has become my own haven.

Cheesemaking and other NZ delights

I still haven't got back into blog routine. It's already over a month since my last post. When everyday life is rich and full, it is difficult to sit down and write about it. Yet the discipline of finding time to write each day is valuable for me and so I want to maintain the blog. Right now I am watching four new grey patrol boats recently arrived in Malta from Australia to join the border protection programme. They shot out of Marsamxetto in a straight line, made a large circle and now they're heading back in.

In this post I'll sketch out the start of my trip back to Malta in November last year. The photo that heads the post shows camembert taken out of the brine and standing for 24 hours before going into the cool cabinet. We made them in a cheese-making workshop run by my cousin Vicky. My red-headed cousins live on the east coast of the south island of New Zealand and I called in to see them when I found that my plane trip to Cuba stopped over in Auckland. It was easy to arrange a flight from there to Christchurch and a flight back via Wellington so I could also visit my dark-haired, slightly greying cousin, John. There are cheap internal NZ flights available online that Vicky put me on to. At first I had considered taking the train journey from Auckland down to Wellington, across on the ferry and then along the coast to Christchurch. I had enjoyed that trip once before, but discovered that it no longer ran and would have taken too long anyway.

Vicky and one of her daughters drove up from Oamarau to meet me at Christchurch. The trip takes several hours so it was a long day for them and I was very grateful not to have to worry about finding somewhere to stay in Christchurch and then catching the bus. Vicky offers her house as a B & B called the Red Shed and it's a great place to visit. All her family have thrived in the New Zealand culture where craft and bush skills are valued. There is always an atmosphere of support at Vicky's for the various creative projects and adventurous endeavours that everyone gets into. Whilst I was there we made brie and camembert, tried our hand at decoupage on large objects like tables and chairs and learnt how to make giant twig balls. I also watched Vicky's son as he put his young dog through its training for hunting and tracking. We had a potluck supper where everyone brought a dish not only cooked themselves but also grown or caught themselves. We had delicious white bait fritters made from fish caught in the local river and eggs laid by home chickens, all kinds of home-grown vegetables in salads and pies and baked, and delicious chutneys and cheeses. I was only there for two full days and I felt I had become part of a happy, creative community. I am so glad that I can use electronic media now to keep in touch with all the exciting things that continue to happen in their part of the world.

On my way back to Auckland, I stayed overnight in Wellington, that lovely city on the South coast of the North Island on the channel between the two halves of New Zealand. My cousin John and his wife welcomed me into their busy lives as academics and community figures and at the University I was helped to track down some more information about my mother's side of the family who had gone to New Zealand some generations before my mother was born in Malta.

In my next post, I'll get on to our great trip to sing at the International Choral Festival in Cuba.

Icing on the cake

This is the icing from the cake my aunt-in-law (is there such a relationship?) made for me when I visited my relatives in NSW to say farewell before I left Australia. I keep promising to get onto my journey to Malta via New Zealand and Cuba but when I sit down to start there are more things to say about leaving Australia.

My sailing boat came into my life 15 years ago. It was my birthday present to myself when I turned 50. It is a classic 22ft open cockpit yacht built in 1948 so not much younger than me. I fell in love with its beautiful lines although in many ways it is an impractical boat to sail on Moreton Bay. It has a fixed keel so it is sometimes difficult to get it out at low tide through the shifting channel in the mangrove and mud Tingalpa creek where I kept it moored. And without a cabin, it is adventurous to stay out overnight.

I sailed single-handed, learnt about the tides and worked out how to stay out overnight sleeping under the boom tent. I saw in the millennium anchored in the Broadwater at the Gold Coast to watch the fireworks. On the way back, I called into Horseshoe Bay at Peel Island and was standing in the water close to the beach as a pod of dolphins were herding fish into the shallows for their breakfast.

The sailing became more challenging as I became older and less agile, but it was breaking my wrist that pushed me to bring my boat out of the water and put it on a cradle at the front of my house. It took on a new life as a local landmark and I set up the timber mast as a flagpole for my Eureka flag. I had pangs of guilt from time to time as I watched it deteriorating. My boat pined to be back on the bay.

Last year, when I was living for half the year in Marsaxlokk, someone started making enquiries of my Australian neighbours about what was to happen with my boat. So when I returned to make arrangements for coming to live in Malta, I just had to make a few phone calls and my boat had a new home. Her new owner is manager of East Coast marina and he is now working on restoring the boat and sailing her once again on Moreton Bay. It is a huge job he has taken on because we only just caught her in time before she had deteriorated too much. But he knows what he is doing and has the skills and resources to make it happen so when I visit Australia again later this year she should be back in her element, sailing on the bay. That makes me feel good.

Here in Malta, today is the feast of St Paul shipwrecked. I went walking with Ramblers Malta from Mellieha Parish church down through the fertile valley to the bay and then back along the cliffs. We passed the hotel where Malta Environment and Planning Agency have just approved extensions that will spread out over the surrounding fields in a protected zone. The decision has pushed the Ramblers into more active protest and they are planning to challenge in the courts. The invidious creep of over-development in the North of the island is reaching a critical point from which there will be no return. I will be taking part in the protest rally to be held in Valletta on 6th March.

Unpacking my life

These are the 37 boxes that I packed up in Australia six months ago and I am now unpacking in my flat in Valletta. I tried to be ruthless with my life stories but still I have too much to fit into my flat. The books will have to stay in boxes for a while. I unpack slowly, finding a place for each memory as it comes out of the box. I group things differently from before.

Today has been sunny and warmer than the past week. Walking down Merchants street to get the paper, two people greeted me with "bonju" and a wave. I stopped to chat to my neighbour who was pushing her grandson in a stroller and she introduced me to three other women from my block of flats. The woman in the tiny newsagent cellar told me I am now a Beltija, which means a woman from Valletta.

Gathering the threads

My life will catch up with me tomorrow afternoon. Thirty-seven boxes will be loaded into our tiny lift and deposited in my flat. The ship arrived in Malta over two weeks ago but the processes of getting my past back into my present have been complicated. In general, the transfer of my meagre collection from Australia has been without drama. It seems, however, that the transfer of funds is not so simple and that is why my possessions have languished in a bonded store for over a week. I'm not sure how I will feel when I start unpacking.

Last year, I was back in Australia for six months and all of that time, I was preparing to leave. I had decided to come and live in Malta and my return to Australia was about making that happen. Decisions about the detail hadn't been made when my friend, Lou, met me at Brisbane airport with my little car that he had been looking after. It was good to be back.

The first decision that had to be made was about my beautiful house on the bank of a mangrove creek. I had lived there for almost 20 years and there was a lot of myself built into the extensions and renovations I had made. Yet it was easy to decide to sell - the creative work was finished, it was good and I was ready to start my next piece. The process of selling was also easy once I had negotiated the uncertainties of the current economic climate by having the house independently valued. When I put it on the market, it sold within three days. The Real Estate people have a special name for it which I've forgotten - something like a heart sale, meaning that the buyer falls in love with the house. I was glad I could reject the other offer from a guy who didn't understand my house at all.

After that, I spent an interesting few months camping out in the house as the sale processes went through. I sorted through all my possessions and put my life into piles. There were treasured things like my collection of framed community theatre posters and the scale model of Bluenose, the first Americas cup contender, that needed to go to particular people. That pile was fairly easy as I had already thought about that for when I die. There were things that particular friends could make use of such as my fridge, my chopping block on wheels and my car. There were all the things, particularly books and lifetime memories, that I couldn't bring myself to dump and that is what will arrive here this afternoon. And all the rest went into a garage sale when my cousins came down from Mt Tamborine to help me. The night before the sale, I invited all my friends and neighbours to come to a party and choose a memento of me from the books and ear-rings that hadn't made it into the pile for Malta. Then after the garage sale, everything that was left went to the charity shop. I felt almost euphoric during that whole process, but my last night in an empty house was strange and sad. My plan was to spend the last day before settlement in the house so that I could go through and clean it lovingly before handing her (does a house take on the gender of its owner?) on. But my choir was singing at a peace rally on that day so everything became a bit rushed and I couldn't linger as I had hoped. In the end, I was racing to load all my final bits into my car and get the keys to the Estate Agent so I couldn't indulge the tears that were pricking my eyes.

After the house was sold, I felt different about being in Australia. It was as though now I was really a visitor. I did all the practical things like settle on my flat in Malta and arrange a loan on a small rental unit in Redlandshire so I would still have a foot on the ground. In the last few months I was house-sitting for friends, rehearsing every week with my choir ready for our exciting trip to sing at the International choral festival in Cuba and making my farewells with friends and relatives. But in my heart I was already on the way. In my next post I'll tell the story of my journey from Australia to Malta via New Zealand and Cuba.

The photo that heads up this post is of the waves crashing over Sliema front near the Fortizza. We have had a lot of big winds in the past weeks and when it is from the North or East the waves break magnificently over the North/East facing side of the island. My flat looks out on the Grand Harbour entrance and the waves cascade over the breakwater.

Hope for 2010

My first post for another year. It's now almost two years since I started the blog and looking back I am so glad that my niece, Sholeh, got me started. I now have a record of my travels in 2008/09 and as I settle back in Malta, I'll start documenting again my experiences day to day as well as putting up some summaries of packing up in Australia and shipping out to Malta via Cuba. The photo is of weathered rock in a fort we visited in Santiago de Chile.

I'm watching the red Round-the-Harbour launch come in through the gap in the breakwater from Sliema and now the big traditional luzzu that also does the trip. They are both crowded with tourists so there may be a cruise liner in. I have the computer set up at the living room window so I can watch the busy life of Grand Harbour. I love getting to know the moods of this small piece of the Mediterranean that can tell so much of the story of the lands that surround it. Every day, as the winds shift, the sea takes on a different colour. Today, the wind is from the South East and the sea is calm, rippled grey. Some high cloud gradually works its way across the sky and the wheeling pigeons flash white against it.

My shipment of the pared down remnants of my life will arrive here after 12th January. It will be strange to unpack all that memorabilia sorted and packed in another world, another life on the other side of the globe. In my next post I'll start telling the story of that process.