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afford the only decent restaurant, Salvina’s) I’m relying on these plus vitamin pills. The menu attached to the snack-van at Ramla Bay reads: spaghetti & chips, hot dog, hamburger, fried egg, white bread & butter. When one lunchtime I went to its counter, the only things I could bring myself to buy were a bottle of soda water and a packet of banana chewing-gum manufactured in South Korea.
    To-night (to-day being the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows) a Madonna is paraded through the central square, supported by grim or giggling males, and accompanied by rocking candles in red glasses. The effigy is followed at snail’s pace by a baby Austin van inside which a big peasant priest, his knees forced up under his chin, drones intonements through a crackly loudspeaker strapped to the roof. Around it, and behind, shuffles a throng of Gozitans in subfusc clothes, muttering responses. Some German tourists, jazzily attired, are silenced by the spectacle, and look on motionlessly until one of them takes a photograph, and the spell is broken, and they disappear noisily down the hill. Overhead meanwhile, thousands of birds are screaming in the trees. Their multiple, overlapping chirrups grate violently on the eardrums. The triple conjunction – shuffling Gozitans, jazzy Germans, screaming birds – makes me feel sick. Why this particular form of helplessness should strike, I don’t know, but I’m not surprised by it and decide to return to the refuge of my room and an evening with a book, a bottle of Bacchus, and tins.
    A Sicilian friend of mine has a theory that the people of the sea are more intelligent than the people of the mountains because sea-air confers some chemical advantage to the development of the brain. The Gozitans seem not to support his theory in that, though generally good-natured when you do get through to them, they are not conversationalists or mentally agile. Rationality isn’t their strong suit either. So to-night in the bar of my hotel it takes persistence to extract from the owner’s son that the hotel is over one hundred years old and has always had the same name. For some reason he feels this is compatible with its being named after the Duke of Edinburgh who is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Such elementary failure of logic is what can stun you hereabouts and, as so often, one wonders whether religion be the cause or effect of such a condition. In fact the hotel must be named after the previous holder of the Edinburgh title, Prince Alfred, ‘Affie’, Queen Victoria’s fourth child, who married the daughter of Tsar Alexander II. (Subsequent research discloses that Affie was also Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, a keen violinist, and a collector of stamps which on his death in 1900 he left to the British Museum.)
    The hotel is very conveniently situated. All the amenities of the town – bank, post office, newspaper shop, the Rundle Gardens, the two theatres, the Telemalta overseas telephone service – are only a few steps from its front door. I must tell you – I was phoning from the Telemalta office yesterday and asked for a London directory. They didn’t have one; they had very few directories. ‘We have this,’ said the pretty girl, eager to help, and she handed me the directory for Costa Rica.
    Good Friday. The Crucifixion of Our Lord. Why do they call it ‘good’? It’s like Sunday with knobs on, a gloom of the spirits so palpable you could bottle it and sell it as paperweights. Every flag is at half-mast. The theatres have placed crosses over their entrances and from the balcony of the Aurora two loudspeakers broadcast tapes of their brass-band blowing sedate Victorian and Italian marches and slow dance tunes, all in minor keys, with very miser-able effect. The failure to hit notes adds an extra blighted touch and all is smeared into a whine by the poor quality of the sound system. A little boy and girl holding hands