Malta: No Longer Just for Falcons

A 321-minute read, but don't ask me to believe you've got more attractive options

Our most recent international adventure begins, as so many of them do, with an afternoon-before taxi ride to Gatwick Airport, at whose Premier Inn we will spend the night because check-in for our flight is barbarically early. Over the years, my disinclination to dine at the PI’s overpriced and mediocre restaurant has finally landed, and Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) has come to accede to our buying a bagful of delicacies from Marks & Spencer to enjoy in our room.

This time, we arrive at the M&S in the South Terminal just as a young woman is affixing markdown prices to sandwiches and salads too long unpurchased. I am of course beside myself with glee. While we dine, seated atop our bed, we view a television program that make clear the simple (or, more accurately, huge, double-chambered air fryer is the answer to everything that makes humanity fretful.

We check in, with the help of what I have finally been able to persuade Mrs. Mendelsohn to call a a sherpa, as in the Nepalese who help people ascend the Himalayas. Our nearly three hour flight to Malta is uneventful. I read about the phone-snatching epidemic in London in one of the armful of free newspapers and magazines we snatched en route to our departure gate.

Another cab ride ensues. Our Maltese driver inserts what I think is a Carrie Underwood cassette while we head for our hotel in Bugidda.

We are on the island of Malta listening to country music.

Once having lunched, I, as tradition dictates, set out to explore the environs of our hotel while Mrs. Mendelsohn rearranges the furniture in our huge, oddly shaped room, hangs up her gowns, and neatly lays out her makeup in a way that others might describe as OCD, but which I have learned to regard as cute.

I have a remarkable experience in the course of my exploration. Having declined to pay 12 pounds for one at Gatwick, I am intent on buying an American-to—British electrical adaptor for my ancient iBook, and walk down the main street on which our hotel is located until I find a stop that stocks ‘em. By and by, I decide to reverse my direction, and am amazed to discover that I am standing in front of our hotel. I have never had such an experience, and wonder if I am losing my mind.

A few minutes later, back up in our huge, oddly shaped room, I discover that I had exactly the sort of adaptor I needed in my carry-on. Senile much, Johnny?

The food in the Gueliz buffet restaurant’s about a B, though it will soar to an A-minus over the course of our stay. As at lunch, I eat a great, great deal of it. Aside from a brief flirtation with 175 during my years as the life partner of the San Francisco Zoo’s koala keeper, I have never not weighed 165 pounds. I am a little over six feet tall, and considerably less gorgeous than in my gorgeous days.

We’re on the all-inclusive plan, which includes alcohol. Before dinner, Mrs. Mendelsohn necks a succession of aperol spritzes concocted by a bartender who seems to hear every drink request as a derogation of a beloved family member. I am disheartened to learn that the bar has neither of the Greek liqueurs on which I enjoyed getting legless in December 2023, when we stayed at our hotel’s sister hotel in Mellieha.

The evening’s entertainment is an ambitious production show celebrating the music of Elton John. There are two male singers, both of whom sound as though their native language is something other than English. Francesco has the range and power of one who has been trained for opera, and is a little exhausting. One of the chorus boys, with Sideshow Bob hair, a pretty face, and a muscular, very lean body, inspires Mrs. Mendelsohn to murmur, “My word!” I am not overcome by jealousy. Much.

Over the course of the performance, I have necked two double vodkas and orange. It is the first time I’ve been properly drunk in about a year, but I do not remove my trousers and bound up on stage to ask the audience if they agree that Elton John deserved a much better lyricist than Bernie Taupin, though I discover that believing the true title of one of Elton’s biggest mid-1970s hits to be “Don’t Let Your Son Go Down On Me” still seems hilarious 51 years later.

Mrs. Mendelsohn and I try to recreate my hallucinatory traipse, but are unable to figure out what happened. Heading back to our hotel, we are accosted by a (very!) fast-talking Mancunian who I suspect could recite the complete canon of Rosie Goodwin in 90 seconds. He tells us that if we go have a quick (no more than an hour) look at the nearby Mayflower Hotel, which is cheaper than our present one, to consider for future visits to Malta, we will receive free bus passes.

We wind up spending 100 minutes in a stuffy, windowless room with a tiny Maltese woman who speaks as softly and inaudibly as the Mancunian spoke quickly. She tries, gently, to persuade us to buy memberships in a scheme by which we will be able to stay a week anywhere in the world for no more then £249 between us in a hotel room no less nice than the Mayflower one she shows us. I admit, under duress (I began asking for the bottom line several minutes ago) that I would enjoy visiting Mexico. She projects onto a big monitor a list of the many accommodations from which I could choose. There’s one picture of a hotel, and several boxes with X’s in them where photos ought to be. Maybe I should have chosen a different destination?

Tiny Maltese Woman turns us over to The Boss, a florid, porcine Scot who of course counters our every demurral by scribbling little diagrams for us. He’s good at what he does, and we waver for a moment. Finally, we are turned over to a woman who awards us our two bus passes, good for 12 euros worth of travel.

We calculate that we have been compensated at less than the UK minimum hourly wage.

Mrs. M believes me, unfairly, to have the judgment of a four-year-old, and looks out for me too aggressively at times, as when we walk the two blocks to the Bugibba bus terminus to catch the 286 to Rabat, Malta’s hilltop former capital. She is a hyper-vigilant crosser of streets, and I one who has been knocked down by an oncoming motorist, sustaining a torn meniscus, only once. Often when we disembark the 371 Toward Manor Circus in Eton Street, in Richmond, she will scrupulously stand there waiting for the bright green man to illuminate, though no cars are coming, and will try to physically curtail my insouciant crossing to the north side. On such occasions she seems to regard me not even as a four-year-old, but as a four-year-old dog. and is not pleased, here in Malta, by my scampering across the terminus to Bay 2, rather than taking the prescribed, notionally safer route. Once we board the bus, we must tap the magic card we were awarded at the end of our epic battle with the timeshare ghouls yesterday. I look in confusion at the thingie on which we must tap it.

“Here,” she insists, of a spot she believes to be the right one.

“Here,” the driver says pointing to the right right spot. I hesitate for a moment, and the driver growls impatiently. I’m embarrassed, and start planning the sharp talking-to I will give Mrs. Mendelsohn as we choose a seat. By the time we are seated, though, and I have had a moment to remind myself that she always gets over things instantly, and that I ought to try that some time, I have resolved not to tell her off.

The journey south on the 286 is notable mostly for how crowded the 286 becomes. Malta’s population is approximately half that of San Francisco’s, and most of it seems to have boarded our bus at a succession of stops the pronunciation of whose names you wouldn’t in a millennium divine from how they are spelled. Written Maltese looks like the product of a game of Scrabble in which all but four vowels were discarded, and replaced by 25 X’s, 20 K’s, and 15 Ws. From one word to the next, the spoken version sounds Spanish. Or Arabic. Or Eastern European. Or even German. What a good thing that everyone seems to speak English!

In Rabat, we walk around in the Medina, within the walls, searching for a fridge magnet for Mrs. Mendelsohn’s remarkable collection, of which I am honored to be deputy curator. There seem to be only two that actually say Medina as well as Malta, and I pay for the one Mrs. Mendelsohn has chosen. I give the fat black Arab at the till a 10-euro note, and he gives me the magnet and 2.05 euros in change. The magnet was 2.95. “I think you owe me 5 euros,” I note in a way I hope he hears as amused rather than argumentative. He points out the 5-euro note in my left hand.

Senile much, Johnny?

We begin learning how best to eat in the buffet restaurant. I make myself a glorious salad containing pearl onions and sun-dried tomatoes, neither of which is purchasable at the German discount supermarket where I buy groceries, and come to realize that when the little card says, for instance, Baked merluza with sage butter sauce, said sauce isn’t that in which the merluza is bathing, but in the bowl right beside it. Eureka, baby! The addition of the sauces makes a world of difference!

Stupid much, Johnny?

I get a haircut from a young Syrian without much English at the Man Cave, a few blocks down Triq-Turisti. He keeps re-dampening what’s left of my hair, and then brushing it as though to try to dislodge my scalp from my skull. “Gentler, please,” I can’t help but yelp at one point, but he seems not yet to have added said adjective to his bag of English. I ascertain that he’s pleased about Bashir al-Assad’s having fled the country, but there our conversation both begins and ends.

It’s karaoke nite in the big, charmless entertainment venue, adjacent to the decidedly not-cosy Kosy bar, presided over the surliest bartender in the Mediterranean. Well in advance of the actual caterwauling beginning, a charming local comes over to ask what we will be performing, and what my name is. He seems never to have heard the name John. “Like John Lennon,” I say. He seems not to have heard of John Lennon.

When, just after Mrs. Mendelsohn’s reliably spirited rendition of John Lennon’s “You Can’t Do That”, the MC tries in vain to summon Jane to the stage. I realize after a while that it is I for whom opportunity is knocking. I perform the Elvis version of “Danny Boy”, and the audience is largely undelighted. Moments, later, a stour little Irish woman dressed to chop potatoes performs a Tom Jones song, and the audience adores her. She’s followed, among others, by one of those tuneless bozos who keeps his free hand in one of the pockets of his jeans while singing. The audience adores him. A young Bulgarian woman performs a heavy metal hit of her country, with the very enthusiastic encouragement of the large Bulgarian contingent, and the audience — especially her fellow Bulgarians! — adores her.

An eastern European goofball bounds on stage in shorts and spiritedly, atonally, performs an exuberant song in which looks to my untrained eye (the lyrics are projected onto the big screen behind the singer) like Polish, which I must accept looks no less strange to the eye of an English speaker than Maltese. The audience adores him. As is her wont, Mrs. Mendelsohn later performs Blondie’s “Presence Dear”, which is exactly as familiar to the audience as the Bulgarian heavy metal anthem.

Was it my performance that the audience disliked, or that “Danny Boy” may be the somberest song in the canon? Was it my new haircut, or that they were expecting a Jane and instead got a Johnny?

What a wonderful start Thursday gets off to. I am about to begin wantonly overeating at the table in the less forlorn half of the huge dining room Mrs. Mendelsohn and I have come to think as ours when a guy in a hoodie, breaking fast with children, says, “Top job on ‘Danny Boy’ last night, mate.” He is Phil a, lorry driver and part-time doorman from Bethnal Green, a working class enclave of east London mentioned in my 2003 song “She’ll Have to Go”.

Moments later, Mrs. Mendelsohn appears, a glass of orange juice in each hand, and Phil marvels at the two of us being a pair. “You were the two best of the night,” he says.

Not only have we had the good fortune of the most discriminating listener on earth having seated himself nearby at breakfast, but after the unrelenting rain, it’s gorgeous outside, so we head for Sliema, where we’d stayed our first time in Malta, and at whose architecture I longed to gaze.

The bus ride proves grueling. The nearer we get to our destination, the shorter the distance between stops, and the uglier the surroundings. At last we’re in Sliema, right across St. Elmo Bay from the gorgeous capital city of Valletta. The shoreline is lined by multistory new apartment buildings, on the ground floor of which abound bistros, cafes, and the sort of chain stores at which the rich and glamorous buy their clothing and accessories. Several residents of the hi-rise apartment blocks have hung banners reading, “Don’t ruin our neighborhood,” over their balconies. My guess is that what they say between the lines is, “I’ve got mine. Fuck you.” Because Mrs. Mendelsohn’s idea of a good time is looking at the advertisements in their windows, we go looking for an estate agent. She ascertains that Sliema is very expensive.

We booked our week at the San Antonio because it’s the more interestingly-situated sister hotel of the db hotel in Mellieha Bay where we spent an enjoyable week in December 2023. There’s no comparison between the two. The Mellieha Bay hotel was bright and cheerful inside. Its dining room didn’t induce a dopamine deficiency the minute you entered it, and over the course of a week a guest yearning for a break from the excellent buffet restaurant could dine in each of three specialty restaurants, offering Asian, Middle Eastern, and Italian cuisine. I have never been the president of the Middle Eastern Cuisine Fan Club, but at the end of the meal at db’s Levant I wanted to kiss the chef’s hands. Every dish was more sublime than the last.

The Asian one was nearly as wonderful, and the Italian one, in what felt like a proper restaurant, within hailing distance of the Asian.

Far from kissing his or her hands, I would like to encourage the chef of Tagine, the San Antonio’s Middle Eastern restaurant, to consider re-training in a different profession. Compared to Salia, the specialty restaurant offering Mediterranean cuisine, Tagine is the best restaurant in Spain’s Donostia, and as one who was mistakenly invited to the 1979 San Sebastian Film Festival and on arrival given a packet of vouchers redeemable at the restaurants of my choice, I am able to assure you that Spain’s Donostia’s is culinary heaven.

I don’t waste food. I feel it’s my moral imperative to finish what I’ve been served, or what I’ve compiled in a buffet setting. But I took one bite of the grilled fish that was my main course at Salia and realized that there are limits to even my conscientiousness. Lacking a delicious sauce of the sort I have learned to seek out in the buffet restaurant, and sort of tough, it conferrs no trace of pleasure, which ties it in ignominy with the grilled peppers on which it sit. I manage some small self-consolation by imagining that there’s a local cat who’ll find it ambrosial.

Gozo!

In the big, horrid entertainment venue adjoining the Kosy bar, in which toils the surliest bartender in the db family, a kiddie’s disco usually precedes the evening’s main event. Commonly, this involves a mob of shrill little brats newly overdosed on sugar running around screaming. But we now have skin in the game, in the form of our fan Phil’s two kids, Lee and his little sister Jess. Rather than running around shrieking, the two are adorably intent on following the lead of the young animation team member in charge.

It is worth noting that on Malta, as in my native country, and in all locales in which common sense is king, it is the hokey pokey about which it all is. (In the United Kingdom, a country in which educated adult podcasters pronounce the Spanish given name Juan to rhyme with man, it’s the hokey cokey.)

Featuring dozens of costume changes, and breathtaking athleticism, the evening’s main entertainment, Dances of Many Lands, borders on the spectacular, and leaves the standing-room-only audience open-mouthed in amazement. At its conclusion, the dancers line up, their perfect 22-year-old bodies glistening with sweat, for photographs with the audience.

Mrs. Mendelsohn and I have a policy of pretending to want buy photographs of complete strangers on amusement park rides. “What are you on about?” the depicted person or persons will demand. The photo’s of us, not you!” To which we will commonly reply, “But it’s a wonderful photo, and we were here first,” before graciously acceding. In this spirit, Mrs. Mendelsohn snaps many photos of our fellow hotel guests cosying up to the dancers, of which I am proud to present this one.

When we arrive home from our excursion to Sliema, an old gentleman (probably five years my junior) is sitting alone in the street-facing annex to the Mezoc Club bar reading a hardcover book. When we return hours later, to try to get drunk enough to enjoy the evening’s entertainment, he’s still there, so entranced by his book that he didn’t seem to notice that there ’s insufficient light to read by. Hemingway, I wondered? Houllebecq? Murukami? Stephen King?

“Really enjoying that, it looks like,” Mrs. Mendelsohn observes cordially.

“Yes,” the ancient bibliophile happily concurs. “It’s one of those books you can’t bear the thought of finishing.” He shows us its cover. Chicklit. Historical romance. Rosie Goodwin’s Our Fair Lily. Something like that.

The world is full of wonder.

In bed, waiting for The Sandman, I wonder if I will write a review of Salia. I have written a great many restaurant reviews over the years, and was mortified with embarrassment a few years ago to discover that I usually say exactly the same thing about places that have disappointed me: “[Restaurant] might be described as mediocre if it were a lot better.” Is it my moral responsibility to spare future diners the grave dissatisfaction I experienced at Salia, knowing that my review might be the last nail in its coffin? What if its proprietor is a kind, generous person who’s doing his or her best in the face of obstacles of which I know nothing? I decide I will keep my opinion to myself. Let the diner beware!

With the rain coming down by the Olympic-sized swimming poolful, Mrs. Mendelsohn and I repair to a pleasant corner of Club Mezoc, which serves unspeakable coffee concoctions and other beverages, to read and write. Speaking of which, I reflected two days ago on the old American standard school days, in which the singer happily recalls “reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick.” How wonderfully progressive our pedagogy in that era! It must have been hellish for dyslexic children, forever getting whacked with sticks. Is it any wonder, really, that a few decades later we would re-elect the worst president in our history?

Anyway, Mrs. Mendelsohn and I pass three enjoyable hours at our little table, she answering emails and playing Angry Birds, and I, who have been known to write a whole Stonking Novels album worth of lyrics while sitting beside a swimming pool in Sicily, writing enough lyrics to keep me busy composing melodies to propel them until 2026. At one point, Mrs. Mendelsohn shows me a cruelly classist meme that’s amused her. It depicts a council estate (roughly the equivalent of an American trailer park) couple, both morbidly obese, their three brats (all by different daddies), and lots of fast food logos. The three boys names’ are of course Jayden, Layden, and Okayden. Within 15 minutes of glimpsing the meme, I have written:

At lunch, a few tables a way, a toddler reaches for something on the table, and, being a toddler, and clumsy, knocks it over. Mama grabs his hand and gives it a good hard slap. Oh, for a hickory stick.

By and by, the weather decides to grant us a wee repreive, and we walk around the tip of the peninsula on which we’ve bivouacked. Later still, we enjoy dinner in the hotel’s buffet restaurant, for which Salia and Tagine have made us grateful. At breakfast, I had smoked tuna, which looked alarmingly like beef, but tasted enough like smoked salmon — my favorite food in all the world — to confer considerable pleasure. At dinner I enjoy pasta absolutely drowning in cream sauce, a fish curry, yet another in a succession of salads of my own creation, and little square of salmon and risotto pie, the salmon in which is smoked. 17,000 calories of pure pleasure!

Malta really knows how to do a thunderstorm.

We catch the 9:30 bus heading for Ċirkewwa at our nearby bus stop, blowing resonant raspberries at Tagine as we lope past. Within a few stops, the bus has become crammed, and I implore Mrs. Mendelsohn to switch places with me so that if some enfeebled elderly person should come and stand in the aisle trembling beside me I won’t look a frightful so-and-so for not offering him or her my seat. Mrs. Mendelsohn reassures me that I myself look enfeebled and elderly enough not to be expected to surrender my seat.

The ferry station’s waiting room makes the bus seem uncrowded in comparison. When we are invited to board, a tiny elderly local woman with a lion’s heart keeps barking a word comprehensible only to locals and bulldozes a little corridor through us non-locals through which about a dozen elderly but certainly not enfeebled locals eagerly elbow their way to the fore.

I had expected Gozo to be unremarkable at best, or maybe even desolate. It turns out to be stunning, tied with Capri for the second most gorgeous island we’ve visited, after Ilha Verde. the largest of the Azores. I appreciate that the blue skies, filled with beautiful billowy clouds, has its thumb on the scale, but OMG! It’s as verdant a place as these old eyes have ever seen, and littered with gorgeous old houses of worship like the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of Ta' Pinu.

Enfeebled oldster that I am, I haven’t had a drop to drink since breakfast, but of course have rejoiced at several points in the day, at the proximity of an accessible gentlemen’s room. How wonderful to have reached a stage of decay in which it’s imperative to remain hydrated, but dangerous to remain hydrated if leaving the house or hotel for longer than 10 minutes..

Our excursion to Gozo has failed on only one count. Given the infrequency of the hop-on/hop-off sightseeing bus, we didn’t alight in Victoria, a teeming metropolis of 7000, to buy a fridge magnet, and none is for sale at the ferry terminal. Mrs. Mendelsohn is not pleased about having to waive one of her cardinal rules — that every magnet must be purchased on-site, if you will. I assure her that we will be able to find a Gozo magnet at one of the several thousand souvenirias in Bugidda, and a casual observer might have failed to see the anguish in her green eyes, but I, of course, did not.

Oh, the deliciousness of the dinner I curated for myself after a brief snooze, half an hour on one of the exercycles in the viewless gym (our many cruises have made me accustomed to looking out at oceans while pedaling my way to fitness), and a shower.

One on one, or one on several, Mrs. Mendelsohn is as sweet as can be with children, though she detests them as a class. Irresponsible parenting makes smoke come out of her ears. The more cheerful sector of the dining room, in which we prefer to dine, has been roped off for reasons not elucidated, so we eat in the dismal area, through which a pair of seven- or eight-year-old twin boys race back and forth shrieking while Papa, presumably, eats a lot of pork and dreams of the tattoos he will get next week in Blighty. Mrs. Mendelsohn speculates that the hotel doesn’t urge him to wake the fuck up for fear of his writing on Trip Advisor that the hotel isn’t kid-friendly. She then speculates that if the twins were to collide with diners heading back to their tables with bowlfuls of hot soup in hand, and the twins were to be scalded, Papa would sue the hotel. It makes for an interesting over-dinner conversation.

And then the evening’s entertainment — a singing and dancing celebration of the musical theater. Since listening to a four-part podcast about the Peróns last month, I have become a very big fan of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, though I understand it’s deeply unfashionable to recognize Andrew Lloyd’s brilliance.

Come and get me, coppers!

Mrs. Mendelsohn has predicted that, because Malta is a Roman Catholic country, nothing will be open on Sunday, our last day on the island. It turns out that everything is open on Sunday, including the souvenir shops.

I have always wondered wha the proprietors of such shops make of us. I can imagine their proprietors advising their husbands over dinner that the most bizarre thing happened earlier in the day. A blonde woman who probably crosses streets very carefully and her enfeebled, elderly male companion must have spent 20 minutes looking at fridge magnets. Before they finally bought one, they must have spent 15 minutes trying to decide if it was the one they liked best.

We are crestfallen to discover that there’s no such thing as a dedicated Gozo magnet. The one on which we ultimately decide says Malta + Gozo. It’s the best we can do, even though it’s pretty big. and space, owing to the collection’s extensiveness, has become a prime consideration. We have spoken of getting a bigger refrigerator, but that would require a bigger house.

The buffet restaurant is absolutely heaving. Mrs. Mendelsohn speculates that we’ve been joined by many locals, who come to the hotel of a Sunday to enjoy feasting together. She points out that many of our fellow diners look Maltese. I’m not quite sure how one looks Maltese. Many of the locals look like Los Angeles chicanos, others like very dark-skinned north Africans, and others like the grandchildren of East Asians.

After lunch we take the bus to St. Julian’s, where the rich, but not rich enough for Sliema, live in multistory apartment buildings overlooking the bay, and within walking distance of Malta’s wackiest skyscraper, which looks as though its bottom was designed by an architect heavy into art nouveau, and whose upper half looks like it was designed by the most conservative architect in the southern Mediterranean. We wind up spending most of our time there awaiting the 212 bus back to Bugibba.

After dinner, I go out for my frhird long solo walk of the day, over whose course my app informs me I will have taken 18,500 steps, and note that Sunday night in Malta is like Saturday night in many other places. Bars and restaurants that have been closed all week are bustling. In the Elvis Lounge, a roly-poly little man is karaoke-ing an obscure Elvis song to the considerable displeasure of those trying to enjoy their dinners.

According to Sky News, Los Angeles has ceased to burn down, and the Israeli/Hamas ceasefire and Donald Trump’s imminent inauguration are the only interesting things going on in the world. There are interviews with a succession of reasonable-seeming Trump spokespersons who predict that Monday will be the dawn of a new golden age for America, and I wish (as when have I ever stopped wishing?) that I were a major rock star who would think nothing of pulling the TV off the wall and tossing it out the window.