You are doing yourself no favours at all.

‘Phoenicians breeding with the Maltese’? You have understood nothing.

The fact that many Maltese people in the 21st century have boats has nothing to do with some random man from the coast of Lebanon having sex with some random woman in Carthage 3,000 years ago, and one of their descendants moving to Malta 2,000 years down the line.

It has to do with the fact that Malta is a tiny island, the sea is immediately accessible within minutes by everyone, the beaches are overcrowded, and people now have enough money to buy boats.

When I was a child, most Maltese couldn’t even swim and never went anywhere near the sea, and many of those who lived away from the coast never left their villages or saw the sea – let alone had a ‘love’ for it.

Even the people round where I live in Bidnija/Wardija – both in sight of the sea – only went down to the coast once or twice a year, to collect salt.

There have always been fishermen in Malta because people needed to eat to survive, and not because Maltese people love fishing because they are descended from the Phoenicians. People ate fish because the alternative was eating snails and sparrows.

If we are going to talk cultural attitudes, Maltese people are actually landlubbers with a huge fear of change and of moving far from ‘home’.

Unfortunately, you seem to have imbibed rather too many of those false and romantic myths that were fed to Maltese children, which lots of those children, on reaching adulthood, never bothered to question.

In any case, there is absolutely nothing romantic about the Phoenicians – you need to read up on the reality, starting with the practice of child sacrifice, and how the mothers of children who were set on fire to appease the gods were drugged so that their children could be prised from their arms and dragged away to be murdered.

But stick to your charming myths instead – like Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy, they are very reassuring.

The Maltese population is little more than a thousand years old, and its core is Tunisian via Sicily (Arabic-speaking Tunisians settled in Sicily then moved to Malta).

It is absolutely ridiculous to claim ‘descent’ over 3,000 years on the basis of genetic markers. Have you no concept of just how many people – of all sorts and from all kinds of places and races – would have had to breed, bringing all their complicated genetic heritage to bear, to produce you or any other Maltese person in the 20th century?

You speak as though Malta was thick with royal-purple-wearing Phoenician traders in AD1400.

I despair, truly.

And if your argument held any kind of water, Lebanon today would be the seafaring and merchant capital of the world, but it hasn’t been that for centuries.

But then it probably doesn’t occur to you that the real and proper thoroughbred descendants of the Phoenicians are today’s Lebanese.

And who and what you are descended from makes little to no difference anyway in this particular context.

It’s the imperatives of survival in the geographic context which count. Ports always produce a criminal culture, and the bigger and busier the port, the bigger and busier the criminals.

Malta developed a criminal culture like all ports. The Maltese hinterland, for the purposes of socio-cultural development, might as well not have existed. It simply did not count.

Maltese culture is port culture, full-stop.

Because it must.

Nothing and no one.

Not really, no. The Maltese are not natural seafarers but land-based villains.

Attenta ta, dak jista’ jtellgħek il-qorti.

Eh, għax kont għoddni nsejt, il-kugin ta’ Keith Schembri, Ryan ta’ More Supermarkets, x’sar minnu? Dak ma qalx li dalwaqt se jiġi lura Malta?

X’taħwid.

We’re a nation of pirates.