Comment of the day – Life in the Golden Years (1)
Published:
May 24, 2012 at 8:07pm
Posted here by Sowerberry:
I remember going on a business trip to London in the early Eighties with a Mothercare catalogue and a shopping-list about two feet long.
The sales assistant told me they got plenty of Maltese husbands in the same situation and was very helpful, but I think she had a bewildered impression about the situation in Malta.
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Pity Franco was playing with his cock at the time. He would be less of a nuisance.
He still is.
Actually, now he’s the cock.
“Actually, now he’s the cock.”
Who’s playing with him?
“Actually, now he’s the cock.”
Who’s playing with him?
Il-habib antik tal-klassi Form 2c … Joseph.
Where did Sowerberry hide the cash he needed to buy all the stuff on the two-foot shopping list? It couldn’t have been listed on the Gaddafi-green passports, could it? Not when foreign exchange limits were so ridiculous.
You would be surprised at the ingenious solutions people found to take the cash out of the country. Drug smugglers would learn a thing or two from those days.
Good thing Pepsodent toothpaste tubes could be uncrimped. You then removed some paste and inserted your sterling, tightly wrapped in plastic and carefully re-crimped the tube closed.
I have another story about those Golden Years.
Friends who were visiting Catania market were taken aback when they saw the rubbish and clutter on display, when only the day before they’d seen much better quality merchandise on display.
When they asked one of the stall-holders why there was a sudden drop in quality, he replied “Perche’ Giovedi’ vengono i Maltesi.”
Twenty years before the Catanesi used to tell us Maltese :
Voi state bene perche avete avuto gli Inglesi.
We were rich then, in the sixties, compared to them.
Two packets of Rothmans cigarettes would pay for a taxi ride from Catania to Acitrezza
It took fifteen years of Labour government to bring Malta down to its knees. During that same period the standard of living in Sicily flourished.
The tables had been turned thanks to that mad Pantocrator who even Satan refuses to acknowledge and accept.
The good old Sixties, well that makes you what 70, 80 – looks like you’re another one the devil doesn’t want to accept or acknowledge.
And, despite the great advances Malta has made since the Golden Years, some still see fit to buy plastic hair-clips from Sicilian markets, and to write about it publicly.
http://www.frigintini.it/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=79
The mentality remains the same – of the buyers, that is. Anglu Farrugia must be proud, eh?
Going to Mothercare with shopping lists was not all that bad.
It was just humiliating. National humiliation was then a way of life.
I would rather not remember driving around with a boot full of dirty washing (we had three babies/toddlers then) heading to relatives or friends who had some water trickling into their washing machine when we had none.
[Daphne – You took the washing, Anthony. I had so little water that I had to take the baby.]
We used jerrycans for the babies.
We had no less than ten 5 litre jerrycans to wash the babies, the cutlery and the crockery.
I will not say how my wife and I washed.
That would hurt my pride too much.
I remember waiting until around 1am till I heard a trickle of water in the taps, and rushing to have a shower.
The worst bit was having the water run out, while I was still covered in soap or with a head full of shampoo.
The worst was having a shower in a bath already full of water which was then used to flush the toilets, and when that water ran out spraying the toilet with a ‘hygenic’ foam in a bud to mask the smells and sight of a filthy toilet
The worst and most embarrassing part was the customs scrutiny on your arrival at Luqa airport, and being asked if you have any illegal things in your suitcase, e.g. ‘ic-cukkulata’.
Dan kien l-istat ta’ umiljanza li kien gabna fih dak it-traditur ta’ Mintoff.
At the age of 13, on my second visit to London, the first thing I did when I got out on the streets, as it were, was find the nearest newsagent, buy around a dozen different types of chocolates, and, the most appropriate expression is in Maltese, “iffangajt”.
Also, since I then started visiting regularly, I would buy a pair of Nikes or similar, wear them for 3-4 months back home, then sell them second hand for more than I had bought them.
The only decent brand here was Hi-Tec. The shop owner must have had connections, but average price was Lm25, when in the LATE 80s the minimum wage (and most people were on the minimum wage – it was more “standard” than minimum) was Lm28 per week.
Golden years, for those with the connections, without a doubt.
Well, money certainly didn’t seem to be an issue for you if you could afford to visit so frequently.
Things were so bad you could actually afford to go abroad shopping, hawadni ha nifhmek.
[Daphne – Things were so bad, ac, because there was nothing to buy in Malta. Oh, and no work either. Who do you think went abroad to shop?]
No AC, I never went abroad shopping. I happened to have very very close family there, people who left this rock because of the lack of opportunities and hence went to greener pastures.
All paid for.
Daphne, you corrected my minimum wage – I assure you the first job I had paid Lm24 per week, not Lm28, and someone who contributes to this blog who was an office manager or something of the sort – my superior, anyway – was on the massively high salary of Lm40.
[Daphne – If the minimum wage was around Lm28 when I was working in the early 1980s, it couldn’t possibly have been Lm24 in the late 1980s. We had a wage freeze, not a wage melt. You were probably on one of those schemes in which people got paid less because they were students/worked reduced hours/whatever. Don’t compare it to what your manager earned. As somebody else remarked here, the minimum wage was more like the standard wage than the mandatory minimum. Almost everyone earned it.]
I did not, actually, and I was over 18 because it involved driving. But perhaps my memory is failing me or perhaps Lm24 was the take-home pay.
[Daphne – How do we find out?]
It became a matter of ringing the bowsers non-stop then tipping them generously.
Showering at the beach or at a friend who had a well.
We used to shower in freezing water in his garden in summer. If I remember well, seawater was also used for flushing.
[Daphne – Yes, we lived on Tower Road when we first married, and I used to cross the road to the sea twice a day with a bucket.]
The mad thing was all the hotels in Sliema; how did they cope?
[Daphne – They didn’t. When I was in Perthshire around four years ago, I had a business lunch with a group of men, one of whom decided to entertain the table with apparently hilarious anecdotes of how he visited Malta on holiday in the early 1980s, and how he and his wife were told, on checking in, to shower “after 10pm because that’s when we have water” and how he couldn’t drink tea at breakfast because it was made with “salt water” which, he assumed, was from the sea. I didn’t bother putting him straight and telling him it was tapwater, because I was fed-up enough as it was. And the really crazily amusing bit, it seems, was when they finally managed to check out of the airport only to drive straight into a massive “government public meeting full of people shouting” and what do you know, within 24 hours they’d discovered that Muammar Gaddafi was visiting too. What is one supposed to do in situations like this? How do you explain that those were the crazies and that you had nothing to do with it apart from being a victim of the situation? I just change the subject.]
Malta’s entry made it through to the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Well done and keep smiling, Mr Calleja.
Nispera li JPO ma jtihx xi fit issa ghax ghaddew it-Turkija, liberali fejn jaqbillu.
I found an article in today’s The Times quite distasteful as it reported as given that Malta would not go through to the final. The song may not be anything to write home about but surely it is stressful enough for the performers to represent our Eurovision obsessed country without any need for the press to discourage or demotivate them.
I can’t stand most of the Eurovision entries but Malta’s overall track record does not go unnoticed abroad. I remember once being chatted up by a shop assistant in London who asked me where I was from and when I replied Malta, his answer was that we are Eurovision favourities.
Another recent article in The Times congratulated a banker of Maltese descent for a high-ranking appointment. My understanding was that this is a person who was raised in England. If this kind of success makes us proud, how much prouder should we be of our local talent?
I remember how that bastard Mintoff used to ruin every Christmas with something or other.
Power cuts were a guarantee on Christmas eve and lunch time Christmas day.
He was a sadistic, sick individual. How can anyone say ” Malta disastru totali” now? I know what Malta looks like when it’s disastru: it looks like it did before the Nationalists took over and made us proud to be Maltese again.
In Malta during the early 80s, I remember that the atmosphere was so bleak that in summer, the light and colours were also greyish and bland.
In the early eighties Dom had a spat with Japan (and France and Italy and ..) about trade imbalance, so Japanese goods (including cars) were either banned or by quota.
Voila Skoda cars only (at least not the East German Trabant) at a time when they were still hopeless. Thank Dom for small mercies.
You could not buy a Japanese SLR camera for love or money in Malta, and even so the price would have been beyond the spending power (what spending power?) of most.
Am I correct in stating that at the time, there was a limit as to how much money one could take out of the country? (I believe it was quite low) – I sort of remember my dad stuffing money in his shoe. Ode to the joy – these were the glorious days of the “rainbow” budget – poetic decadence!
Quite right. Exchange Control regulations administered by the Central Bank; at one point in time this secion was headed by Joseph Sammut of Mosta, later carpetbagger for the Gaddafis.
@M.Spiteri
In those days travellers could only take out of Malta the equivalent of LM250 (circa Euro600) per annum, irrespective of how many trips any individual made. It was called the Exchange Control Act.
Whenever I travelled to England from Malta in the 70s and 80s, the check-out girls at COOP, Sainsbury or wherever I happened to be doing the shopping at the time would invariably ask if I am from Malta.
The trolley used to be piled up with Cadbury’s chocolate products, and with toothpaste.
That is how Malta was regarded at the time: the place where chocolate and toothpaste were banned for mysterious reasons.
Thank you, Mr Mintoff.