Bliss! The first day of our now-traditional New Year interlude. This year we headed for Malta. We arrived at midday, checked in to our lovely grand old-fashioned hotel, fortified ourselves with a large lunch and hit the town of Valetta - a joyous hotchpotch of limestone fortifications, genteely faded baroque elegance and 1950s britishness (shiny red postpoxes and phone boxes at every turn). The guidebooks had trumpeted "seven thousand years of history" and dangled before us the dual delights of the Playmobil factory and the must-see Malta Experience (a 5D living history show in which the usual audio and visual dimensions were, apparently supplemented with smells, bursts of air and "leg tickling"). We resisted (whenever there was a dull moment we simply tickled each others' legs to recreate the full experience instead) and walled through the maze of narrow lanes and long the fortified walls. We searched for the War Museum but failed to locate it (it was, in fact closed and in the process of being relocated, it turns out). The photo shows Mac, Ed and Will in search of history. Luckily
we found the state rooms and armoury and St John's co-cathedral instead. (co-cathedral? We wondered too. There was no explanation of this strange term anywhere, but through the wonders of Google we found out that the bishop of Malta divides himself between two cathedrals on the island, this one, and the one at Mdina - hence they are co-cathedrals.)
