Notes from Blighty - 'These are the things we'd alte'

The Sawpit is a blog edited by Ralph DeMarco with contributions by Chris Cobb and John Scott Lucas. Chris Cobb is a graphic designer and writer based in London. This week he posted this piece about Malta:

Malta is roughly twice the size of a major metropolitan city, say Washington, DC., scattered in towns and villages. It has a sun-scoured, hilly, Holy Land feel about it; the colors run the spectrum from eggshell to egg nog, all to do with the native rock, a kind of lithified mud typically formed in a river estuary. All the buildings are made from it. It bleaches in the sun to a blinding whiteness. It was pushed up out of the sea by volcanic activity and has been in a headlong rush to return, in a geological sense, ever since. Waves are eating its sandstone hem like mice..

It is a very Catholic island but they must let down their guard for the tourists who make up 40% of their annual income. Mediterranean toplessness is tolerated provided it is surreptitious. Were it not for the sea breeze the island would suffocate in its own exhaust. Many of its buses are British Leylands and Bedfords going back to the fifties and sixties and Malta bears the stigma of the true third world nation: if you abolished public transport the air would be cleaner. But in the end it is a Mediterranean climate, the natives are friendly, the beer is cheap and you can roll off a rock and dive among the fishes...