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.

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?]

@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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

“Actually, now he’s the cock.”

Who’s playing with him?

Il-habib antik tal-klassi Form 2c … Joseph.