The third “schrift” comes from our friend in Brussels whose nickname “gybexi” has a nickname of its own: Kurat van Buitengaats. He was the first among the invitees to call my bluff about the “festschrift in honour of”. Delusions of grandeur he called it. Of course he is right. J’accuse is neither some great academic achievement nor is it dead (touch wood). And in a way, cynical gybexi was just being his good old self. Always the one to slap us down to earth if our egos and ego-battles took us a little bit too far. Cheers Kurat…. still waiting for that home/away challenge in petanque.
Get well soon
Luxembourg-Findel, 2002/2003.
This was, for all intents and purposes, my first ‘proper’ time abroad as an adult.
In the back of the cab there was a suitcase, our suitcase, the size of your average custom-made Ghanian coffin.
I had emigrated, although like all emigrants I wasn’t really aware of this fact yet. It had hit me for a while when my dad clumsily, and unsuccessfully, tried to negotiate our baggage allowance at the check-in desk at MIA. He asked them to show more clemency, “they’re emigrating!”. I thought about it on the flight, but it didn’t seem this was what I was doing. I wasn’t emigrating, just moving there (for what would end up being a long, long time)…
I had packed three weeks in advance. I had several printouts of ultimately useless info. I even had a map of the airport. I was so worried I made myself sick, and was so sick at certain points I saw auras of colour around objects.
The hostel, which was to be our home for about a week, was in a small but beautiful valley. Since I wasn’t that into nature in those days, of far greater interest to me was the commuter train. It was visible from our dorm room whenever it rumbled past; a frequent reminder of the urbanity and exploration awaiting me when I’d stop vomiting naked elves and seeing sacred geometric shapes in my apple juice.
I had been putting off the visit to the hospital, mainly for financial reasons and also because we didn’t really speak French, but as I was getting increasingly delirious I guess I had no choice. They gave me inordinately large and expensive pills, big red triangles, which whittled me down to only mildly crazy in a few days (it would take another two weeks for me to recover from that mother of all flus).
In the meantime we found an unremarkable studio flat with 80s furniture near the train station, vacated by a Spanish girl who had died on a skiing holiday three days before. I didn’t really mind that, although maybe I should have.
I knew Luxembourg was expensive, but the money I had saved up was gone in a few days. I was sick and practically destitute in one of the world’s healthiest and wealthiest nations. So, this is what being a bohemian feels like? Overrated as fuck.
I walked to the phone booths opposite the train station, finding a cabin sufficiently far away from the cadavers who used the booths to shoot up. I was going to call my parents to wire me some cash to get by, but then I thought better of it. I thought of my mother worrying herself sick about us and my dad scoffing (and pretending he’s not worried, even though he is). No.
We lived on nothing but noodles, until A. started working and she asked them for an advance. I worked in the private sector so no advances for me. We opened an account and the Italian clerk at our bank trusted us enough to open a loan account for us (we bought real food – not the ‘Chinese soldier camping on Jupiter’ shit we had eaten for days).
There really weren’t many other Maltese – two as far as I knew – and I worked in the private sector, so my Luxembourg experience was a considerably poorer and more solitary experience than many of the other Maltese who moved there. It also featured lots of medical visits and waiting around perusing shitty magazines in government ministries since Malta was not yet an EU member state when I got there. Luckily, it was fairly easy to make friends with the people at work and even a few Luxembourgers didn’t find the idea of befriending me intolerable.
I had started blogging, and came across Bollettino della Sfigha. It was an extremely exciting moment. Amusing, interesting, often witty and written in an arcane Maltese which made it all the more endearing. It gave me the impetus to carry on at a time when I felt it might be a bit pointless. And then they came. Invading Blogspot. Feeeetħu bloooggg… the lot of them.
And was I happy they did! The blogs were very much a product of their time, but they were – in my view – the best contemporary Maltese literature we had. They were honest and immediate, among other things.
They died not only because of Facebook, but because they were based on boredom, loneliness or both. Here we were in new lands, in new jobs and negotiating many new social paradigms. We also had more time to kill after work, so were more willing to experiment. Maybe the blogs were a way to connect and also advertise our existence. That we were still alive and our brains still functional (more or less) at a time and in a place where everything else changed around us, and that the minutiae of these profound changes in our lives are maybe worth relating.
I, for one, would love to see them back, now that they’re not needed. They’d be an exercise in futility and in writing at length at a time when brevity is a truism rather than another style of writing. We need them… because we don’t.
