As one door closes...

Since I came to live in Valletta 8 years ago, I have never seen this door open. It is the side entrance to the Palace, now the Armoury. In summer in particular, I often walk home around the arcades that surround Independence Square because there is always shade, and then along Old Theatre street past this closed door. Yesterday, the gate was open!

 I ventured in with my grocery bags, past the men standing in wonder looking up at the old clock.

 Inside, people enjoyed this surprising green space that had suddenly opened up to us in the heart of Valletta. The atmosphere was shaded, leisurely, cultural, calm. People sat with children in strollers. Two stone lions in one corner reminded us that we were in Valletta in the middle of a hot summer's day.


Many things have happened in the last few weeks to focus my thinking on open space and culture. Last week, The Times of Malta announced that the Eurobarometer survey had found that Valletta's cultural facilities were ranked last in Europe by residents. Immediately, on-line commentators jumped in to blame or to question the competence of people who live in Valletta to judge cultural facilities. When I commented in terms of a wider understanding of cultural facilities as including the streets, playgrounds, green and blue areas and all the formal and informal spaces where people undertake the daily process of creating their culture and where local residents are often put at the bottom of the list of stakeholders, I was dismissed to go and look up the meaning of cultural facilities in a dictionary.

A day later, the same newspaper reported the wider survey that showed that in fact Valletta comes somewhere in the middle in terms of livability as judged by residents. I've been wondering about what all this means.

"Culture", like open space, is contested. Cultural facilities are constructed to privilege a particular group of people over others. Valletta itself was constructed to privilege "gentlemen" over women, peasants, artisans and Maltese, including the nobility. That culture, of course, has changed. In the19th century, the privileged "cultured" classes moved out of Valletta and left it to the "lower" classes who rented or squatted in the crumbling townhouses or moved into the social housing built after WW2. But the privileged classes still expected to use Valletta as their cultural playground, to drive through its streets and find convenient parking, to shop, to attend the Manoel theatre, to lunch at Casino Maltese, that privileged remnant of the culture of gentlemen. The cultured classes remarked how Valletta was a hub of activity during the day but was dead after the shops closed. What they didn't notice was that after 7.00pm, Valletta was returned to the residents: families hung out in the piazzas, played bingo or bocci on the bastions, caroused in the football supporters clubs and went to bed undisturbed at a reasonable hour because they had to be up for work in the morning.

Now, this separation of the two cultures of Valletta is changing again as the relentless process of gentrification takes hold. Perhaps some of the anger directed by the cultured elite towards Renzo Piano's open air theatre built on the ruins of the Royal Opera House is that this new cultural facility is attracting a different audience that challenges the established view of the nature of culture. And then there is St James Cavalier, now Spazju Kreattiva; Valletta 2018, that is not a cultural facility; the regeneration of Strait St, formerly the red light entertainment district, then a residential area; the restoration of Is-Suq tal-Belt, the old market where some of the men who live in my block kept their butcher shops; MUZA, the former Museum of Fine Art now on the move into Auberge d'Italie; and the Bicceria, the old knights' abattoir, now intended to become a design hub.

I hesitate to say that I straddle the two cultures of Valletta. I am resident in a mixed social housing block in Lower Valletta and, over the course of a lifetime, I have accumulated a lot of cultural capital. I make full use of all the cultural facilities available in Valletta but I also walk the streets with my grocery bags, swim in the Harbour outside the bastions, grumble when my sleep is disturbed by party boats coming in from Sliema, struggle with a helpless grumpiness at cigarette ends dropped in the streets, cars parked on inadequate pavements, rubbish dumped, the smell of piss in doorways and dog shit underfoot. I also listen to my neighbours who tell me that there is nowhere for the children to play, that they are exhausted because they have to look after grandchildren as well as ageing parents, or that they can't afford to buy a flat in Valletta.

Straddling different cultures is often difficult and lonely. But I think that the cultural facilities in Valletta have to help create that bridge. Most have varying degrees of engagement with the local community. Two, MUZA and The Valletta Design Hub, have consciously adopted a process that places the local residents as key stakeholders in the development of their project. MUZA puts story-telling as central to their curatorial practice and have engaged with the local community by inviting residents to choose a painting from the collection, talk about why it's important for them and then see the painting displayed in a public place that has significance for them. Sandro Debono, who is overseeing the shift in location and culture for MUZA, is also enthusiastic about the walk through the courtyard of the Auberge d'Italie, linking La Valette square with Merchants St and thereby opening up to the local community.

The Valletta Design Hub in the area known as the Bicceria in Lower Valletta near Jews' Sally Port has taken this process a step further and seriously engaged with the local residents in the planning of the development. Caldon Mercieca is firmly committed to genuine community consultation using the slow process of knocking on doors, holding street meetings (he uses the term "unconference") and workshops for all those who will be impacted by the introduction of this cultural facility. My hope is that this will lay a foundation for a cultural space that is part of the community rather than a separate, if prestigious, institution.

If you continue along Old Theatre St, past the open door that began this musing, down the side of the old market currently boarded off for restoration, you arrive at St Paul's St and one of two newish zebra crossings.

A resident of St Paul's St tells me that the crossings are the result of pressure from European Union House, located across the street opposite the back of Is-Suq. EU house will be busier during the first half of 2017 when Malta holds the presidency of the European Union and entertains plenty of visitors who will have to walk the streets just as the residents of Valletta. As with most cultural facilities, what is good for visitors should also be good for residents.

This piece has been a few days in the writing and each day, I've called into the courtyard of the Palace Armoury. Already it has changed. The gracious seating has been removed and barriers put in to guide people to the box office and keep them away from the work going on in the old entrance off St George square. I just hope that when that work is complete, this cultural facility keeps the side door open to enhance the arcade past the National library and allow residents to enjoy this green haven as they walk through.

You can't just walk through with your shopping bags!

This is the footpath on the corner of Merchant St and Archbishop St. It is just up the road from the Merchant St entrance the the Valletta campus of Malta University, a beautiful old building that is part of the fabric of the Knight's city.

I could write this blog about the lack of consideration for pedestrians in Valletta. I could write about how pedestrians are at the bottom of the list in sharing the streets. I could write about the lack of a coherent design for pedestrian routes around the city.

Instead, I'm going to be specific.

I was overjoyed when MUZA unveiled their designs for their new venue in Auberge d'Italie. Sandro Debono, a guiding light for the shift of the Museum of fine Arts from South St, talked about the significance of story in curating and of community engagement. But my joy lay in the plan to enable a walking route through the courtyard of the museum from La Vallette square to Merchant St. At last someone was giving consideration to the concept of the streets as the connecting life of the city. Imagine the wonder of a stroll through City Gate, under the new Parliament House, past the back of St James Cavalier, across the back of Teatru Piazza Rjal, across La Vallette square, into MUZA for a coffee, across the courtyard and out on Merchant St, stroll the length of the street past the newly refurbished Is-Suq and the back of the Cathedral and Palace and then...

The flaneur arrives at the photo above.

So, imagine my joy last year when The University of Malta beautifully restored their Valletta campus and re-opened the connecting passage through from Merchant St to St Paul's St. The space became a delightful linking haven away from traffic with occasional exhibitions to raise awareness of the University as a cultural institution engaging with the local community. The University became part of my cultural map and during the week, I walked through with my groceries and greeted the security people on the desk. Here was a cultural and academic institution that was part of the community and part of my life.

Until last week. I resolutely struggled through the bikes and cars above and turned into the entrance to the University. The glass doors were closed and a sign demanded that I ring the bell for assistance. I did, and the door opened. I walked through into the calm space and smiled at the security person who had left her desk and was walking towards me.

"You will have to stop doing this," she said, "You can't just walk through with your shopping bags."

I tried to counter my disbelief by talking about engaging with the Valletta community, about the value of a calm space away from traffic, about a campus that opened out to the community.

"But we are a prestigious institution," she said, "There are plenty of other routes that you can use."

And of course I will use them but my sadness is about an opportunity missed, a chance lost to create Valletta as a city were cultural institutions work with the local community to develop pedestrian routes that are safe and pleasant and build our social capital. Instead, the privileged world of the academic is separated from the everyday life of a working city. A pity.

I tried to post a short version of this blog on the Valletta campus FB page but it didn't get past the gatekeepers.

In and Posting

Using Firefox instead of Safari and suddenly I'm in!

I've been silent for three years as I worked on the third book, Middle Sea Dreaming. The book is about my travels around the Mediterranean Sea and the women who have lived their lives around its shores. On my seventieth birthday, I swam naked in the Middle Sea at the mouth of the Irini Gorge in Crete. I thought about my journey into old age and longed for the inspiration of other women's stories to guide my travels. Now a story is told and the book sits on my computer awaiting the next part of the journey. I am picking up on other parts of my life.

My intention is to continue my blog story during 2017 and 2018 when Malta takes on new political and cultural ventures in relation to Europe. These are interesting times!

Walking with intent

Walking with intent

a spiral of shirts

a carousel of shadows

a burning head

an empty morgue

wet with waiting

Good Friday in Valletta

Finding St George's Bay

This is me at five years old, a year or so before we went to live in St George's Bay.  This month I'm doing some teaching in Swieqi just up the valley from St George's.  It has got me thinking about the process of memoir and writing.  I hate what St George's has become and wrote about it in a blog back in January 2009.  When I was writing Washing up in Malta last year I used some of those ideas in a linking piece and that's what I've reproduced here. 

Landscape is a keeper of memory.  The ghosts of our past drift through the sand and sea, the streets and walls of the places we have known.  When concrete covers the earth, memory is strangled along with the trees.

Finding St Georges Bay

My flat is on the top floor of a large block in Valletta.   The foundations quarry down into the old slave market or so I am told.  The block was built after the Second World War to house people bombed into homelessness.  Sometimes I meet their descendants in the lift.  Sometimes I imagine the ghosts of slaves who wander the stairs lamenting their lost children.

When I am not sitting in the square, I sit at my window and watch harbour traffic leaving and returning through the mouth of the twin breakwaters.  The daily catamaran heads North West to Sicily, the cruise liners head West and East to explore the wider Mediterranean, the float plane lifts off and heads West, North West to the sister island of Gozo. 

At night, the lighthouses at the harbour entrance blink red and green.  In calm weather, small boats fish along the harbour walls.  In stormy weather the waves crash mightily against the ancient stone of the breakwaters.

Sitting at my window, I think about opening up this small world where I have come to live.  Could I put in an arch here, knock out a wall there?   Then I could watch the boats come and go even when I am in the kitchen washing up.

 Is it peculiarly Western this disease, this need to renovate? 

Now, when I scan the local papers, published in English for the benefit of the most recent colonisers, I look for possible builders and architects to help me with my renovations. 

That’s how I notice the advertisement in the Times of Malta.  A conference was to be held to present the findings of a research study funded by the European Union.  The study investigated best practice in equality in Northern Ireland, Italy, Cyprus and Malta. The conference venue is a big new hotel in St George’s bay.    We lived there when I was a girl.

I get the number 19 bus from Valletta and at the end of the run the driver points me vaguely down a road lined with hotels and bars.  I can recognise nothing.  I walk down towards the bay.  I try to feel for the shape of the land underneath all that concrete.

Here is the fall of the valley running down to the beach.  This concrete space must be the small, unmade triangle where dad used to park his grey DKW motorcar.  So to my right is the road where we used to race our go-carts.  I feel again the hairpin down to the bay that now disappears in blocks of flats.  To my left the steps go down St Rita Street.  A small street sign hidden under the huge hot dog advertisement confirms it.

I set off down the steps that are now a warren of small bars and fast food outlets towards the street where I used to play cricket with Ben and Peter outside the nunnery.  At the bottom a huge crane is lifting concrete up to the top floor of a block of flats on the corner.  I scurry anxiously under the enormous bucket.   The workmen on the roof grin their control of this space that once was mine.

The conference hotel is just around the corner and the marble clad entrance opens onto our cricket street. The nunnery has vanished, but for a fleeting image of a small girl pressing the doorbell at the front gate to ask in trepidation for the return of her brothers’ cricket ball.

I sit through the conference knowing that I must be sitting over the back garden of our old house.   It is like sitting on a tomb.  What happened to the tortoise that dad brought back from North Africa to make its home in a hole under the wall half way down the garden?  What about the pigeons and hens and rabbits we kept at the far end and the budgerigars and canaries in large cages by the back door?   Are there any back gardens left for their descendants to sing and lay eggs in?

I am still there for the conference summary but I don’t hear it.   I walk out through the glass and marble reception area in the hot stillness of the afternoon and follow the cricket street down to the bay.  Everything has been “embellished” - an esplanade around the small sandy beach and palm trees planted.  The palms are struggling.  The rocks where I learnt to dive have been concreted over and made into a beach club. 

Piles of brown winter seagrass have washed up on the beach as always.  The concrete has not yet reached the underwater meadows where the natural cycle of destruction and renewal begins.   And here is the little square stone building that the nuns used in the summer to change into their swimming habit.  As they entered the water in a group and settled into a circle to chat, their black habits billowed out around them like the petals of a flower.  What did they talk about cradled in their black roses?  Did they concern themselves with matters of equality in their small, closed community?  What did they think of the little girl who rang the doorbell and asked in English for the return of her brother’s cricket ball?

Back at the flat, there is an email from the architect.  He has completed concept designs and would like to come round to talk about them.

Am I ready for that?  He is such a young man.  I don’t want to stifle his creativity but I sense that he is impractical and his ideas are expensive.  Besides, I am old enough to want my space to remain mine untainted by the flights of fancy of new generations.  I sigh as I phone him and arrange a suitable time for his visit.

Spring voting in Malta

It feels like the first weekend of Spring and Saturday was a beautiful day for queuing to vote.  This is also the first time I have been able to vote in Malta and I can only vote for local government in Valletta, not for the National government.  A policeman knocked on my door some weeks ago and presented me with my voting card telling me where to go and what room I had to find.

Armed with my card, I set off to the voting station with directions from my neighbour who also told me to vote for the young man who was promising playing facilities for children.  I found the school easily at the end of Merchant street - it looked like the whole of Valletta was heading in that direction.  Voter turn-out was well over 90% in all districts.

I joined the end of a long queue and since everyone was chatting in Maltese I got out my newspaper and settled down to wait.  The queue was moving very slowly but the atmosphere was good-natured even though everyone was complaining.  A continuous stream of ambulances and cars brought people in wheelchairs and the police were acting as ramp orderlies as well as crowd management.  As I inched closer to the entrance to the school, a tall policeman told us all to switch off our mobiles.  He spoke in Maltese but I worked it out and dutifully switched off.  He also prevented people who had already voted from talking to the people who were waiting.  People smoked and I buried  my nose in the newspaper to try and avoid setting off my lingering bronchitis.

A policeman was talking at me in Maltese and reaching across the queue towards my newspaper.  i thought he wanted to read something in the paper so I offered it to him.  Everyone laughed.

"It's the law," said the man in front of me in the queue.

"Really?" I managed

"There might be political content," said the policeman, "No political content within 50 metres."

I started folding the paper.

"Put it in your bag," said the policeman.

I felt a bit sheepish but did as I was told.

"I should've brought my book to read," I muttered and got sympathetic smiles from the people around me.  The woman in front lit up her third cigarette.  Nobody talked about politics.  The sun was very hot.  A man in front leant on the barrier and lit a cigar.  The policeman told us all to stay on the pavement.  A tourist couple walking down the road asked the policeman what was happening.  He replied in a very deep, slow voice,

"It is a g-e-n-e-r-a-l e-l-e-c-t-i-o-n"

A small girl broke ranks and went to sit on a block of stone across the street.  She took on the role of crowd entertainment.  She carefully got out her dummy from her pocket and settled down with her hands on her knees.  She flirted outrageously with the tall policeman.  He walked slowly down the queue telling us all to stay on the pavement.  When he returned to the other side of the street, he offered the little girl a poppa.  She was unsure at first but then a huge grin spread across her face behind her dummy.

The policeman asked her something in Maltese that I interpreted as "Do you know how to open it?"

"Iva," said the small girl and carefully put her dummy back in her pocket.  Her nana joined her but the policeman insisted that she should return to the queue.  By this time, I had got to the front and was inside.

The system works well.  I found the correct room and could tell by the familiar faces in the much shorter queue that the rooms were assigned by district.  The room had four polling booths and they let people in as the booths became empty.  I had to give them my card and they matched it up with a photocopy on a sheet, crossed it off, kept the card and gave me a voting sheet.  Then I had to fold it and put it in a box. 

And the result was out soon after midday today.  I was in the Maritime Museum in Birgu when I started to hear screaming and banging as though bombs were dropping.  The man on the desk told me that Labour had won.  Out on the streets, a huge crowd was gathering in the square and carcades were winding their way around the back streets.  On the ferry coming back to Valletta several labour supporters were waving flags and chanting the slogan "Malta for All".  In the lift which was free and through Upper Barrakka gardens people shouted "for all" with a proprietorial air.  It's a good slogan but Malta for all requires each of us to take responsibility for making sure that everyone's rights are respected. I'm disappointed that the Greens didn't win a single seat so that they could have a platform from which to argue against the groups who seek to turn public space into private playgrounds.

Lost in Buskett

A few years ago I walked in Buskett gardens with Malta Ramblers.  Verdala Palace was built by the knights as a hunting lodge and the gardens were planted to serve as their hunting grounds.  We walked past two tumble-down farmhouses and were promised that the walls were to be rebuilt using EU funding.  The plan was to use the buildings as interpretation centres for the gardens.

Now it has happened!  Today I got the bus to Rabat and walked over to Buskett to check out the advertised open day.  This is the smaller of two farmhouses that have been restored.

Walking over from Rabat, I came into the gardens from the top road and was confused by a large crowd of mostly men gathering at a large shed.  It was difficult to work out what was going on.  They looked like hunters or farmers and one had a parrot on his shoulder. 

I attended to my immediate need and found a single toilet.  I returned to the gathering thinking it might be the start of the guided tour.  A speaker system was being tested.  I hung around for a bit as people were invited to sit down.  It was starting to look like a political rally.  I started to feel cross.  Everything has been hi-jacked by the election.  I asked a woman who was sitting on the edge.

"It's the election.  Our leaders are coming to talk to the people."  She pointed me down the road and I set off in search of the farmhouses.  I found the first and largest one quite quickly.

They have done an excellent job of restoring the old buildings.  The falconer was one of the costumed men whose job seemed to be to hang about and answer questions.

 Inside the rooms there were interesting niches probably for cooking and washing as well as ventilation in the walls.  The information boards were intended to give an impression of the future use as an interpretation centre but were difficult to read.

From the roof

 a view of the valley waterway

and this was the irrigation system at the back of the farmhouse

 I walked out through the back gate with the coat of arms

 and set off down this roadway and along the waterway

 The lane petered out before I could find the second farmhouse and so I scrambled up a narrow path and doubled back on myself

 through some dramatic walls and gardens

When I got back to the first farmhouse, the small girl I had seen from the roof was intent on taking
a micro photo of an interesting pattern in the wall.

 I wandered back out past the political meeting place now empty and out on the Siggiewi side where I stumbled on the Olive press and winery.  The stalls with honey, olive products and wine were neat but felt like it was done for the tourists.  But I discovered that the bus stop was just outside and since it was starting to rain I decided to join the fairly large and growing number of people waiting for the bus.  We waited.  The advertised time went by.  The policeman directing traffic said "Don't worry, it comes every hour."  We waited.  I phoned Arriva and once I'd pressed the right numbers to get past the recorded voice and had given the human the number of the bus stop, I was told that the next bus was due at quarter to the hour.  "What happened to the one for the previous hour?" I inquired and at that moment, the bus appeared.

Back at Rabat, I was starving and wandered down to the Cuckoo's nest for lunch - home-made Maltese wine and a delicious slow-cooked meat stew that I suspect might have been horse.  I was the only person there and the family who run the bar were watching politicians on the TV.