Stories from the bus

I had a 7-day unlimited pass so I rode the buses a lot on Malta. One time I was returning to Sliema from Valletta when a young Austrian woman in the seat in front started talking loudly with her (I think) recently minted friend. She showed family photos on her phone and chatted animatedly. For some reason I found her voice irritating and developed an aversion to it. There was no rational reason for this: she was loud but not more so than some people. She wasn't ugly or repulsive. After a while I realised there was a nasal quality to her speech which made her sound whiny. A bit like the falsetto female parts in Monty Python. I'm sure she would have been a perfectly delightful person had I got to know her and her vocal quality would have faded into irrelevance.

How often, I wondered, do we unconsciously take a dislike or discriminate against people on the basis of superficial characteristics? Would that we could always deal with people as fellow humans.

On the way to Rabat we passed the University of Malta. A young woman in headdress stood at the back door waiting for the driver to open it. He was occupied with embarking passengers and had forgotten about disembarking passengers. She waited passively while the seconds ticked away. I got her attention and gestured that she should shout something. The British lady beside me tried to operate the door release but that only worked in an emergency. Happy ending though, the driver eventually opened the door..

There was a system, remarked the lady.

No, I demurred, she was too passive.

We started talking. She was on holiday with friends. She had been an air hostess back in the 60s when journeys to Australia took several hops, which is why she had been to Darwin. She said that the Maltese were paying a high price for modernising. She would have remembered the way it was pre-independence. I'm not sure the young of Malta would like to live in the past. It seems that often those who object to progress are not those who have to live with it.