Every so often, the car starts to deliver messages about being serviced. Like a dutiful but frustrated wife it gives me ample warning, then, after being ignored for weeks, goes ballistic and starts to threaten divorce.

From what I can understand, the car servicing, like changing a plug, is a Man's Job. In our household though, I jump at the opportunity because practically opposite Robert the Mechanic in Zebbug is Ta' Cikka Snack Bar, one of those village eateries which are so ridiculously and sadly missing from modern office clusters.

Ta' Cikka would be at its peak at 6.30am when most manual workers and truckers seem to be on their first break of the day. The pastizzi, a choice of traditional tar-rogg (the twatty ones: in Maltese, a pastizz can mean a savoury snack filled with rikotta, peas or other fillings, someone with no balls or a vagina: that's how multi-faceted this language is) or those round slimy puff-pastry ones. They bring them crisp and steaming out of the oven, or rather, these days, the delivery van.

The orders for ftajjar and hobz bil-bajd u l-laham (traditional flattish bread and those filled with eggs and meat) are coming in thick and fast and bizarrely, the men eat a hell of a lot of chocolate for breakfast. Although the place is packed with men, there is no savagery in these bars: most of them are extremely respectful, always aware of the possibility that, should a fight break out, the knives may too.

It's a simple, buzzy yet non-stop whirlwind of a world, yet when I turn up after delivering Mrs. Car to Robert, dressed in Jimmy Choos and taking out my bright pink lacquer Mulberry purse out of the ice-cream pink Mulberry Bayswater (Barbie? Moi?), not only do these tough guys dressed in sportswear and fleece not bat an eyelid but actually become very polite...even to each other. A punter standing next to me asks for a ftira bil-froga [ftira with omelette) and after two seconds adds 'please'.

I order my te fit-tazza (tea in a large beaker). 'Skimmed?' the guy behind the counter, maybe Cikku, probably not, asks. 'No' I reply 'Tal-bott' [tinned]. My neighbour orders a warm bottle of water. I disappoint the owner who is by now admiring my dietary 'guts' by refusing to have sugar added to an already diabetic hell in a glass of orange-beige thick liquid. I adore how they make their tea: a concentrate of seven million tea bags, the addition of water which has been boiling for months from on high, then the ting ting ting of the kuccarina, the long teaspoon used for a knickerbocker glory or, well, for our tea.

In Snack Bar Land, sugar is a big thing: a physical day justifies an average of four teaspoons with your nescafe, as well as several helpings of pasti bil-krema (cream cakes).

A stooped-over man, eyes full of sleeping pills, hair grey and spiked, a napkin pressed into the back pocket of his dusty black jeans, shuffles towards Ta' Cetta, intently holding forward his verdun fil-gagga. Although much better, and slightly crazier, exemplars of greenfinch-cage-huggers are available in the Marsa area, no bar, snack or otherwise, would be complete without a verdun lover hoping for another verdun lover to compete with.

I sit outside on the simple wooden bench, tea in hand, pasizz on the plattina tal-pyrex, as a man parks his scrambler bike outside, takes off what is very clearly a wartime helmet and walks in in to buy a Kinnie, a pack of Twistees and a packet of sigarri tal-farfett. The scene is such a cliche', you couldn't make it up. For now, until these snack bars still exist, we don't have to.