Octopus Eats Testicles

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We‘re tired after a few busy days in a row, so we sleep in and then spend the morning lazing around the apartment. We head out for a stroll around Sliema and get a snack lunch by the waterfront. It‘s Saturday, and there are lots of people swimming and lying on the rocks.

We head to the shopping mall to look for some gifts for our kind hosts. Louis told me a couple of days ago that a recent survey showed that Malta has the worst obesity rate of any country in the European Union. The same survey however showed that the Maltese people are the second happiest in Europe. I suspect that these two results might be linked. Maltese people certainly seem to enjoy their food, and I reckon that if they were less obese they might also be less happy. The clothes sizes in some of the stores hint at the obesity issue. The average size seems to be extra large, but there are also plenty of extra extra larges, and even extra extra extra large. I didn't know that they made them that big. Issy then tells me that you can also get a size up from that. We seem to have been eating rather a lot since we've been here, and if we stay for too much longer we might well be back here looking for some oversized garments.

We catch the bus from Sliema to Msida, where we’ve arranged to meet Issy's cousin John and his wife Iris. The harbour here’s well populated with boats and we get excellent views back towards Valletta.

John and Iris drive us past their apartment in Birkirkara, which looks out onto the village's old church. John shows me some holes in the lower part of one section of the church walls, which he says is where the French executed people when they ruled Malta under Napoleon from 1798 to 1800; the holes are from the bullets. I'm glad that the French weren't here for very long, and I suspect that the Maltese probably are too.

We head towards the northern end of the island. The roads through the farmland are very narrow with high stone fences on either side. We stop at the top of a cliff near the village of Mgarr to admire the sunset.

We drive onto Mellieha where Iris says there‘s a good restaurant that they’d like to take us to. It looks empty, but the receptionist tells us that it’s fully booked. We look at her in disbelief, but it’s pretty clear she’s got no intention of letting us have a table. I wonder if perhaps I‘m underdressed again. We had trouble with restaurants a couple of days ago and assumed that their owners had developed some sort of grudge against Louis, but I'm now beginning to wonder whether it's me who‘s the problem. Iris looks very disappointed. We drive on to Paradise Bay and find an eatery overlooking the water. The setting‘s idyllic and enhanced by the sound of the waves.

We‘d heard that quite a few movies have been filmed in Malta, and that the island is popular with film directors because of its many fortresses and other similar features that make ideal settings for epics. John tells us that he‘s been an extra in quite a few of these movies, including "Gladiator", "World War Z" and "Risen". He shows us some footage on his phone, and he‘s clearly visible in some scenes in "Risen" in particular, and also "Gladiator".

The conversation turns to Issy's love for Japanese food. Iris tells us that in Japan they eat octopus while they’re still alive, which she thinks is very cruel. It also sounds a bit gross. John says that it isn't as cruel as it might seem because octopuses don't have too much sense of pain; he says that if they get hungry they start eating their own testicles. I take this at face value. Whilst I can't imagine that octopus testicles would provide too much nourishment, I suppose it sounds mildly plausible. I wonder what female octopuses do if they get really hungry; I hope they don’t start hoeing into their partners' testicles. I like eating octopus, and I hope that there’s never a famine in octopus land because presumably the species would die out very quickly if they all then started eating their own gonads. I look across at Iris and Issy. It appears that they‘re not quite as gullible as me. They‘re trying very hard not to laugh. They’ve quickly realised that what John meant to say was that when octopuses get really hungry they eat their own tentacles. It‘s several minutes before normal conversation can resume.

We drive back along the coast to Sliema. This is our last day in Malta and we‘re now feeling very sad to be leaving.

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