Murruiaahh

It’s not mrraia or meraia or whatever. It’s Murruiaahh, as one imagines Tommy Mottola called his paramour in better days, maybe as he was washing the dishes and couldn’t find the cloth, and she was outside splashing in the pool. It’s a name that seeks attention. A shouty name. And half the female population below twelve years living in Malta now sports it.

Names in Malta have truly become something else in the past twenty years. Kristina Chetcuti had the best collection in The Sunday Times of some time ago and that one included the brilliant Cleavage. Of course, I (or rather my parents) cannot say a thing as I have grown up with one of the most bizarre names of my generation.

When I used to hear my parents tell people why (they obviously wanted to know) they called me Mona – not Monica, not Monique, not Ramona – but just Mona, the reasons they gave, and which are imprinted on my brain, so did not make any sense as they recounted them fifteen years later that I could never figure out what on earth they were on when they took the decision.

Maybe it was something medicinal at the hospital, or simply the fact that, as my mother says, they ‘did not feed her a thing and then when they did, it was chicken wings’. This experience led to two decisions: she would go on to give birth to my brother at a private hospital where the nuns would feed her post partum…and she would call him something simple. Such is the joy of being eldest.

Not that Mona isn’t simple really. It does seem to be, on the other hand, very confusing for some. I grew up explaining that it was not short for anything, that yes my birth certificate did say Mona, that yes my ID card did say Mona, that my passport did say Mona. Then I spent 9 years at The Sunday Times and Malta Today explaning that Mona’s Meals was not a pseudonym. ‘Iiii ara’ people used to respond.

I have, in other words, grown up justifying my name everywhere in the world as if it were a crime, a terrible mistake. Everywhere, that is, except in Egypt where I had one of the most common names given to women. I felt right at home there even though I was almost arrested and constantly chased by the police.

Mona in Egypt is like Mariah in Malta but here it is also a complete denominator of where you stand in society, a Catbury’s Crème Egg of calling. Mariah is somewhere middle of the middle class, both parents working, both have O-levels but never bothered with their As although the husband did do a few evening classes. Financially, they are comfortable (through loads of overtime and shift bonuses) and most probably they have a two car garage as they would never imagine parking the Vitz out on the street.

Mariahs are the children of very inoffensive parents.

Yet the poor things will forever have to be stuck with a name which sits nowhere and yet everywhere. Calling them Mary would have been heinous. Maria [Marijjja] sounds déclassé to the Maltese. So Mariah it is, with a Maltese accent of course.

All of this is simply due to the fact that on a Sunday at a restaurant in Mgarr, Malta, a Mariah was sitting on a table next to ours, drawing and staring at us, as children do in that weird way of theirs. She turned out to be the only ‘normal’ thing around. Everything else was one extreme or the other.

Half the restaurant was packed with hamalli hamalluni. Women in Miss Sixty jeans, which unfortunately stretch quite a lot. So while in a pair of Sevens they would be a 36 (if Sevens made thirty sixes, which I don’t believe they do) in a Miss they’d manage to fit into a 28.

Poor, poor 28, struggling to contain that war of fat and upper leg suf, a wonderful explosion of muffin top cascading over the white belt, bought to match the 4 inch heeled white patent boots and a nice little white patent bag bil-glitters. Child was, in many cases, dressed like mummy, a bit like Jordan and Princess Tiiaamii (hey now that’s a name).

Dad wears a swagger on top of jeans which show off his ball control a little too explicitly for comfort. They ate the rabbit bhall-puliti, from the plate not a bowl, with cutlery which they abandon two seconds in (‘x’iz-z***’). Most of the time though, they eat the frozen chips which come from the packet, they ask for ketchup, they slurp the spaghetti. Their children eat chicken naggies (or nuggles – did I misspell that?) because they won’t eat anything else. Hi.

On the other side of the room, the clothing is practically the same, still unattractive, but we are now looking at the highest class of class on the island. The jeans are still tight but in a Marks and Spencer boring kind of way, in an I-never-have-sex-especially-with-my-husband kind of way. The women, in fact, look like dykes or simply spectacularly boring, as if they never see the husband because ‘he works too hard’. Most of them, odd for a Sunday lunch, are dressed in black.

Both groups shout. In fact the Women in Black group shout harder and with more imperiousness.

What separates them is language. The hamalluni are, in fact, more understated than what, in our school days, we used to call snobs. The latter are loud, their Maltglish clattering all over the ‘decorated’ walls of the restaurant. Their children speak a hybrid and their men code switch: if in front of the women and children, it’s English with a Maltese accent. If not, in Maltese. Their boys have developed a patois of slightly odd quasi-English, like that of the Indians in Goodness Gracious Me who are more British than the queen. They sound like gay rugby players.

Now that I have possibly offended every single person reading this (go on, admit it, there is a part of you somewhere up here), we will move on to the food. And there is nothing that screams culture but food and how we eat it.

Years ago I wrote that the New Life Bar had let us down by providing us with packet chips. The owners never forgot so when we turned up, they provided a huge and delicious dish of home-peeled chips, twice fried as should be. I wish I had eaten just that. And the rabbit.

Everything else was a bit of a let-down, mostly driven by the fact that when people go to these rabbit places they don’t want the genuine but their approximation of genuine. They don’t care that the horsemeat is foreign and from Spain, rather than Malta; the actually like the fact that they presume anything not local is ‘cleaner’ and has been through more stringent processes. They have obviously never been to a Thai abattoir.

They don’t give a crap where the rabbit is coming from. I do. I want the stuff we used to eat twenty years ago, a bunny which has been running around and eating grass, not force-fed kilos of corn and cereal-based pellets for its entire life. In Spain.

I don’t want my bebbux (snails) to be doused in litres of Bisto-based sauce, which these were, along with the horsemeat, which was falling to bits. Not because it was so long slow-cooked, as it should be in its traditional way, but simply because the imported version is too young and tender to cope with the Maltese recipe which is the essence of cucina povera.

I don’t want the karawett (peanuts) to come ready roasted and packed in small plastic bags. What on earth is that? I want them to be in skins: the process of breaking those crackly coats and prizing the bean out is as important as the actual eating, if not more.

In the holy grail for our traditional rabbit place I become more and more saddened by the fact that 90% of what comes out of traditional Maltese places is actually foreign.

I am partaking of a masquerade and seeing my national cuisine die a gentle death, encouraged by patrons who not only do not know better, but have no interest in knowing better. And those, my friends, can have children called Cleavage, children called Mariah or children called Luke.