No matter how how hard they try, surveys, with their skewed questions, can only point at change but never manage it. They analyse our lives, but can only skim its superficial, numerical surface at best. Life is still the same, but we have changed the way we live it. I asked a total of one person that: me.

Take our work life, for example. It used to follow a simple formula: work your ass off in order to be able to work your ass off later on until you retire, then die. As we speak, I know a good bunch of people who got off their supposedly ‘high-flying’ jobs - lawyers, restaurateurs and even a doctor in one case - earned after years of studying for post-graduate degrees, to join customer service departments and answer phones on the floors of foreign companies operating from Malta.

Starting at around Eur20k a year, they are probably earning more than they ever were as junior lawyers. The phone stops ringing when they leave the office, and a holiday is a non-interruptable time spent somewhere exotic. Their colleagues are their friends, but there is no obligation, and nobody competes for the same tiny bone. What’s more, they didn’t even have to relocate to get the good life.

Our homes have also changed. Yes, a good portion of us – mostly those who are extracting their dates in some factory, working disgusting, soul-sapping hours of overtime (payback time for not learning how to write their own names) are still kitting homes out in cheap crap they think looks expensive, still buying light-deficient maisonettes with aluminium-framed views over their neighbour’s toilet, still thinking 15 units of air-conditioning are the best a man can get.

Yet an ever increasing number refuse to toe this line. We’d rather find a wreck and convert it, much prefer to have one decent bedroom than five cubbyholes, would kill for a garden and the prospect of wrecking our knees weeding. A car is something that gets us from A to B, not a killing behemoth fashioned out of metal and space-shuttle accoutrements in which we celebrate our manhood by driving up and down our village road until we’ve run out of gas.

We do a lot of home entertainment, opening up our personal spaces much more frequently than our parents ever did. The house is something to share, to show off a little, rather than to preserve in formaldehyde for the post-Easter tberik. Sales of recipe books have shot up because we like to eat with our eyes. We read guide books for fun then set off to China with nothing but a credit card and an empty suitcase.

We seem to be a mass of what were previously considered to be contradictions. Yet life is simpler. Doctors read Grazia, Vogue and Top Gear, although probably stop short at saying that the Playboy in their bag was bought for research purposes. Top notch business women read Jilly Cooper on the plane and are not ashamed to say it. Men expect children to come running to them after they arrive home from work, not out of respect, but because they really enjoy it. We think nothing of grabbing the car and going to Sicily for a 2-star Michelin lunch, or booking a holiday where we spend a week learning how to cook Southern Indian food.

All this, and a lot more has changed our choices. Before, we went to a restaurant, or else a club. The ones that went to clubs didn’t go to restaurants. These days, there are Alex Grech’s Reflex parties, where 19 year olds in skimpy clothes mingle with middle-aged IT specialist couples who just want to flail their arms to Big in Japan.

The one social place that tried to bring the lot together is the much maligned wine bar. To many, a wine bar is a way for a businessman to make a hell of a lot money from mark-ups, where everyone thinks they ‘understand’ wines but don’t, for the offloading of cheap cheese and ham at foie gras prices, for the proliferation of uncomfortable furniture in supposedly glam surroundings, for turning every hole in the wall into a ‘chill-out area’. In reality, we just wanted somewhere to hang out which did not involve a 5 course meal or a burger.

As a general rule, I detest wine bars. I find that most of the time, even with my rudimentary grape knowledge, I know a hundred times more than the server, and sometimes even more than the owner. I hate their pseudo-food and their galletti, and I particularly cannot stand the darkness which doesn’t even come with the comfort of nicotine.

But we had to try Legligin. First of all, because I drive by it every time I go into Valletta; second because I was curious; and third because it was about time we met up with My Book Publisher and The Book Marketeer again. Fourth, and most important of all, because I had a hunch that the guy running it was the same one that used to cook at Figaro! in Merchants Street. I invite you to go to the website and read the review. I was right. As usual.

Judging by what I’ve seen at Legligin, I will posit a highly unlikely, completely invented, idea. I think Chris, the owner, loves his food but prefers the rigors of the kitchen to the horror of managing staff. I think he found he was let down more than once by the people he employed. I believe he may have preferred to have a smaller, self-managed, self-serviced place which would run exactly on the lines he wanted.

Legligin is so small it doesn’t have any space for a kitchen. From gossip, from The Funs of Mona’s Meals on Facebook, and from what I could see, he prepares a variety of dishes at home, and brings them over. Then he does the unthinkable: he heats whatever needs to be heated up in a microwave.

Under normal circumstances, I’d be out of there quicker than you can say ‘you’re going to trip in your Pradas dashing up those steps’. Normally, I would hang up on whoever told me to ‘not be later than 8.30’ for ‘food’ in a semi-dour tone on the phone. Usually, a man who went around tables telling people that ‘this is not a restaurant’ would be taking too much of my air. But these are not normal circumstances. And this is certainly not an ordinary wine-bar.

Chris calls the bits of food he serves tapas, but since tapas comes from the Spanish for ‘caps’, used to cover beer bottlenecks, then these aren’t. I’d rather call them Malta’s only menu degustation. We had a sublime chicken and walnut terrine, some superbly fresh crusty bread, very herby meatballs in tomato sauce, smoked fish, mussels in cream, and a wonderful, very intelligently chosen selection of French and continental cheeses. Practically all mouthfuls were well thought out, suffused with flavor and the perfect thing to nibble and more.

He opened one of ‘his’ 1994 St. Emilion bottles for us. St. Emilion is Wine Man’s pigeon. I just drink it. I only know that the selection of wines at Legligin is amazing, the storage inside the walls preserves the exact temperature, and that the owner really, for once, knows what he’s serving and does it with no pretensions whatsoever, just enthusiasm. Then we had another St. Emilion, which was much richer, darker and mellower. We preferred the second to the first. I’m sure I have just stunned you with my amazing wine knowledge but I could not be bothered writing their names while I was there.

There is no dessert, which could be construed as a pity, but in a very French way – and Legligin is like a French tavern – Chris offered us what I presumed was a home-made truffle. Just a 1cm cube of the most gorgeously creamy rich dark chocolate dusted lightly in cocoa. Divine.

For the way we live now, I guess we really have it good. Legligin just adds to the formula. If Chris wants to do it his way, then really we can do little else but understand because that’s what we’re doing too.