The Curmudgeonly Traveller

  Friday 11 th July 2025 (Part Two) Sailing into the Grand Harbour of Valletta at sunset is magical. Half the passengers come to the front to film it. I feel like, I don’t know, Cleopatra? After a narrowly averted altercation between Mrs Mad and a rude female crew member at an international border we are picked up by a ridiculously friendly cabbie who gives us a potted history of Malta in the fifteen minutes it takes to get to Rabat, obviously because he wants us to hire him for a tour. Very informative, he knows his stuff, but sorry no. It’s another sweaty night. Our Airbnb is described as a ‘property of character’ and it certainly has loads of that. The huge ancient beautifully-restored thick-stone staircase takes up the entire ground floor and the walls are half a metre thick. Which means the cellar smells of damp and there’s black mould on the ceiling and cutlery, there’s no aircon outside of the rooms and, to top it off, there’s the steepest and narrowest 20-step spiral stair...

  March 2020 We last went to Sicily in March 2020, the excuse being I needed to do further research for my nearly-completed novel that no agent wanted to read on account of it having nothing to do with Katie Price. We had heard news of this recent thing called the coronavirus, but nobody was advising us not to go. A flight to Catania and bus to Siracusa, we were picked up at the station by the son of the Airbnb owner. “Aren’t you worried about this pandemic thing?” I asked him. “Nah, that’s just in the North of Italy,” he answered like a true Sicilian, but he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box and drove us three times around the island before he remembered where the Airbnb was. This was on the Tuesday and Siracusa was deserted. The next evening BBC News informed us that on Thursday all Italian schools would close until further notice. On Friday the Italian Government announced that the whole of Lombardy, Liguria, Veneto, Tuscany etc... (the North) were to be completely locked-down...