Yes. You have sold away your old fashioned way of life. Who needs to bother with troublesome villas in this day and age anyway? Gardens, ants, leaking roofs and shoddy maintenance jobs as every handyman and his Somali sidekick try to rip you off.
The way to do it is to join the glamorous club down at Tigne Point, Sliema where the exclusive and elusive gentlefolk are moving into in droves: the elite of the local society and the cream of western Europe to boot. It costs an arm and a leg but it’s still a great investment – the views are good but the neighbourhood and the people are to die for….
The picture that you conjured in your mind is the stuff of Cosmopolitan magazine covers: an exclusive condominium with passers-by and coffee sippers on wayside cafes straight out of Bay Watch.
Five years down the line your dream is morphing into a nightmare. The Cosmopolitan models and the Baywatch girls are looking more like a scene from Khartoum airport. Mothers in hijabs herding dozens of toddlers up and down the Central Plaza. There’s hardly a neighbour that you recognise and guessing nationalities is becoming your daily past time. The elite have long since rented out their apartments to all sorts and sundry willing to pay the sky-high rent that they demanded or sold out their property at a handsome profit to the Arabs. You have just inherited the aftermath: a delicious multicultural mishmash thronging the artificial alleyways that crisscross the concrete Lego blocks. Then, as you sit at one of the cafes on the elegant Central Plaza, an open space that was carved out of the mini urban slum by the developers out of necessity rather than generosity, it suddenly hits you:
The damn thing is not even symmetrical!
The buildings that loom over you are reminiscent of the jumble of cheap apartment blocks that clutter Bugibba.
Worse still, they even make even Busietta Eyesore in Madliena look good.
The greatest day of your life was your clever move to Tigne Point, an even greater one will be the day you move back out.
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