This place is full of single, ‘open minded’ women. Every six months a fresh crop of stagiaires land in a rainy town which offers good parties, an international environment and endless opportunities to meet new people. This is where I developed my Opportunity Principle which explains everything you ever need to know about relationships between men and women. Forget that crap about Mars and Venus. I’ll tell you more about the Opportunity Principle some other time.
By the time we were twenty, we had worked out the key to understanding our nation. Like Pawlu on his way to Damasku we were blinded by the clarity of our discovery. It was a question of statistics and it goes like this:
400, 000: the total population of The Republic of Malta. 200, 000: the approximate female population. 40,000: the number of females aged 18-35. 20,000: the number of females in the 18-35 age-group who were in a ‘meaningful relationship’. 18,000: the number of remaining females with whom conversation would be ’severely limited’. That leaves you with 2000 women. A fair guess is that out of those 2000, about 400 of them would find you OK.
400 eligible women seems like an ocean of possibilities. But we were not just cynics, we were also artistic snobs. We hated mediocrity. So we decided that for a variety of stylistic preferences (noses, accents, tastes in music) the real number would boil down to 50 eligible women. This was a deceptively encouraging number – before experience kicked in. By the time we had survived two tedious years of university, most of us had indirectly exchanged fluids with several of our closest friends. Our calculations soon showed us that it was either a lifetime with girl number one or a lifetime of pathological wifeswapping in a predominantly Catholic country.
So we dabbled in foreign girls, our safety valves and proof that sanity could only be found very far away. For these girls would come to visit, bask in the sunshine, drink Kinnie and Cisk, feel the warmth of the honey-coloured houses and fall in love with the salty taste of a Mediterranean summer. They would then depart, leaving us to Tal-Qroqq, dreary pot-holed winters and the fifth season of Xarabank.
We had decided that the insanity of our country was simply structural. No ‘new way of doing politics’ would ever change that. Harry Vassallo was fighting a losing battle, a modern Don Quixote.
It was time to get out. Fast.
