Yet another journalist asking for an interview in the light of my little country's accession to the EU. I'm tempted to start believing that Malta is in fact important to our fellow Europeans...surely from a cultural standpoint.

In his email, the Italian journalist working for Swiss radio RTSI asked me to relate the "reality of the city of Paceville, its contradictions in with such a strong history and present". Fine, I thought, this could be "it".

Paceville, for those who know nothing about it, is the leisure capital of Malta, with a myriad of pubs, discotheques (or in 21st century jargon, clubs), cinemas, pizzerias, restaurants and what not, which, on weekends welcomes thousands of young and not so young revellers aiming to wash away the boredom of the rest of the week gone by. Ah, I almost forgot, there is also a Church cum Catholic centre aimed for young people searching for a soul amidst the din ... as if the Catholic Church, ever so eager to resist its extinction, was going to abdicate from such a fertile land! Now that would be a fine example of Maltese contradiction!

I have no idea when Paceville was established  as the leisure capital. I myself have known it since my teen years. Leafing through some newspapers from the 70s I found some notorious references to the place. Notorious? Yes sure, Paceville makes the headlines every so often with youngsters arrested for drug possession (nowadays it's coke or ecstasy but back then it was hash or speed), brawls, and the occasional murder. It seems it was like that too back in the 70s. It is the place where the night is always young, where loud noise is always on the agenda, where girls dress the most revealing of outfits, where boys tend to turn macho when the occasion arises, where alcohol is consumed by the tonnes. It is all that, and most probably not much more.

Occasionally it is visited by two opposing bands of people: writers and politicians. The latter make sure to pay a visit when they are campaigning for elections - it is good to become accustomed, once in a while, to the young world and make the best of it to win a couple of hundreds of votes. Writers, on their part, have turned Paceville into a kind of paradigm which proves to be rather fruitful. I myself have indulged in this, so did Joseph, sive Guze' Stagno, and even the elderly Frans Sammut and someone else whose name I can't recall. Now it seems that even European journalists have been attracted to the spot.

Paceville is a paradigm after all. It offers countless opportunities to study what the hell is going on in this island. Because it is not just band clubs, religious processions, passion plays for lent, fund raising activities for the needy political parties and so forth that shape the 'cultural' map of the island. It is also, or rather most prominently Paceville City and its citizens.

It is, in a way, a microcosm of Maltese society. Some outlets are frequented by teenies, others by twenty something, others thirty or even forty plus. Other outlets are for headbangers (yes that lot is not extinct yet), some for ravers (oh gosh!), some for god-knows-what. There is also class demarcation of course, because class, albeit out of the political and academic agenda, is still very much there. And as I pointed out above, there is also place for some religious minority.

I may be visiting Paceville soon, thanks to this Italian journalist. I'm sure I'll have shivers going down my spine because Paceville was never my thing. Maybe I'm too much of a snob to hang around the leisure city.