Make them shiny, make them wide…

Looking at old photographs has a strange way of increasing one’s sense of… mortality. 

Some years back, part of my job actually consisted in poring over reams of old photos (often on microfiche) at the National Library in Valletta, or the Santu Spiritu archives in Rabat, and sometimes in private collections here and there. It was for a ‘nostalgia’ series of prints that, I suppose, was ultimately intended to boost newspaper sales.

But it was an enormously interesting thing to suddenly be occupied with. I probably learnt more about Maltese history just by looking at those images, than from all the history lessons I ever took at school put together (unsurprisingly, seeing as how ‘Maltese History’, in my schooldays, actually ended with the arrival of the British in 1800…).

And there was this distinct feeling of privilege, too. It felt like taking a sneak peek, from a great distance, at world which no longer is, and which can no longer ever be again. You start wondering how much your understanding of more distant history might also change, if that sort of record of it actually existed…

Then there was the mortality business. I remember one time I was zooming in on various parts of a large scanned photograph on the designer’s monitor at work. It was some sort of celebration in St George’s Square, Valletta, circa 1920 – I was, in fact, looking for clues to identify the event. There were mounted soldiers on parade in the square, and crowds thronged the pavements on all sides, spilling down into Old Theatre Street… gentlemen in hats, ladies often with parasols, and an occasional black blob here and there that might have been an ghonella… when I found myself looking straight into the eyes of a small dog in the foreground. 

He was sitting there, quite oblivious to the festivities taking place behind him, looking directly into the camera… and ‘smiling’, too: in that happy, doggy, waggly-tail sort of way…

We all laughed – there were colleagues around the desk at the time– until someone said: “Poor thing, who knows where he is now?” 

With that thought we fell silent. Then I zoomed in on individual faces in the crowd, blurred though they were in the distance. It applied, of course, to all those people too. Except perhaps that baby held aloft in its mother’s arms to get a better view: and who might now be… oh, 95 years old? 

Yup, that’s the thing with old photos. They have a habit of making you look at the present from a slightly different perspective.

Sometimes, however, the same general effect takes other, less melancholic forms. Recently I stumbled upon an old photo taken in Valletta in 1914. It was one of those ‘Can you guess where this is?’ online competitions that sometimes crops up on the social media. But I was less interested in exactly where it was (turned out to be Old Bakery Street, facing St John’s Cavalier), than in what it told me about the more general changes that have taken place since then.

Enlarging the image, my eyes fell upon the pavements lining either side of the street. Such was the unequalled beauty of their perfect symmetry that I almost gasped out oud. I had just tramped back home from an expedition to the grocer down the road – it was like trying to find safe footholds in a treacherous Andes mountain pass: you almost needed a donkey for the harder parts...

And there before my eyes lay two, magically smooth and perfectly aligned pavements climbing gently upwards, straight as an arrow, almost like a vision of the path to the Pearly Gates. They actually radiated with perfection: a sort of ephemeral sheen that glistened in the sun. Oh, and they were broad, too: twice as broad as the Valletta pavements today, and rising elegantly – organically, almost imperceptibly – from the street in between. 

And it set me thinking: how, but HOW could we manage to engineer such a marvel of wonder and delight way back in 1914… and yet prove entirely incapable of matching that achievement today, with all the advances in technology and human inventiveness that have supposedly taken place since?

It is one of the great mysteries of the universe. Like the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the Library of Alexandria, the secret wisdom of the ancients has evidently been lost.

This, too, set me thinking. Was it really the case that past civil engineers had more expertise at their disposal 90 years ago, than they do today? Could it be that they took greater care not only of the practicalities – straight, smooth pavements being more convenient as well as safer than the rocky, lunar, crater-filled terrain that passes for a ‘pavement’ today – but also the aesthetic sensitivity of their final creation?

Going back to all those other photos, the question assumes a newer relevance. In many cases – though there are exceptions – a sneak peek into Malta’s celluloid past will reveal that old buildings, too, were a good deal easier on the eye that the ones that have gone up in our own lifetime. Some of the classic 1910-ish Art deco buildings still stand, though most are hidden behind more recent urban sprawl. But an astonishing number of buildings that would almost certainly be scheduled today have been lost; and what has arisen to replace them often looks like as faceless and soulless as a series of concrete tombstones of varying height, leering back at you from above. 

Here lies Architectural Excellence, which passed away due to unknown causes some time after the 1960s…

Still, it’s never too late to reclaim that which has been lost; and in this case, what’s been lost is that unique combination of aesthetic finesse and pragmatic, down-to-earth serviceability. What’s been gained, on the other hand…

OK, let me put it this way: in other, unrelated news, it transpires that Malta is (yet again) officially the fattest nation in Europe; and we don’t need the news to inform us we have something of a traffic catastrophe on our hands, too.

You think all that’s unrelated to the shocking and execrable state of Malta’s pavements today? I beg to differ. Look back at the old photos. Not only do you see beautiful pavements and elegant, magnificent architecture… but you see skinny people, too. We weren’t the fattest nation in Europe back in 1914, I can assure you. Why not? Well, apart from the trifling matter that most people were severely undernourished at the time, and that life expectancy in general stood at around 32… it was all this strange, mysterious activity called ‘WALKING’ that did it: walking, on those magnificent pavements that glistened with perfection: a calorie-burning aura that evidently radiated upwards and into the bodies of all who set foot thereupon…

Trust me, this is a proven scientific fact. You are what you walk upon.

So where does that leave us today? We know what our problems are: we are obese and addicted to motorised transport. Oh, and you also need a donkey to negotiate the perilous walkways that characterise most residential neighbourhoods in 21st century Malta. Even so, there’s still a chance of disappearing forever into an unexpected sinkhole that wasn’t there yesterday…

And how do we approach these problems? We try and improve the public transport system… with little success, or so it seems. We organise car-free days, so that politicians can regale us with hilarious re-enactments of Fantozzi’s finest hour: the legendary cycling race in 1972. And all along, we stolidly refuse to acknowledge where the real source of all this malaise really lies.

It’s the pavements, damn it! They’re impossible to walk on without risking life and limb…. and there’s no direct civic responsibility in the event of injury, death or accidental disembowelment caused by stepping into that unnoticed open drain, or tripping over that giant stone block that one day materialised in your path. 

As a result… we don’t walk at all. We drive everywhere instead, so the only actual exercise most of us get consists in the daily trek from sofa to driver’s seat, and back. Naturally this means more traffic on the roads, as a nation of overweight car addicts routinely takes to the streets en masse every time it needs to travel more than a maximum of 60 metres…

And all along, the obvious solution to this giant mess has been right there before our eyes: staring at us from a photo taken in Valletta in 1914. Fix the frigging pavements! Make them smooth. Make them wide. Make them shiny, side by side. Above all, make them a pleasure to walk on again, like they obviously used to be in a not-so distant past.

There: all Malta’s health and infrastructural problems solved, and I didn’t even charge consultancy fees. But solving Malta’s problems is hungry work, let me tell you. Guess it’s time to prise myself off the sofa, trek down to the car and drive all the way to nearest grocer, a full 60 metres down the road...