Seven O'clock in the evening: an excellent time to head off up the road and find a nice place to relax in with a beer to hand; to see the town and views by night!

Our ship had that day arrived in Malta, giving us one-night to visit the town and to experience the culture first hand. Only two of us went ashore and with neither clue nor idea about where to go, what to see or even what the local currency was we put on our walking shoes and off we toddled on an adventure. As a seafarer I know from experience that the best place to get information about a city or place is in a bar, and I also know that nearly every bar near a port will take US dollars!

We stepped off that ship and we walked up a hill! We walked for miles and many more and never once did we see a bar. My companion, having no compunction about asking the way, stopped many a local and asked for directions and they gesticulated violently up one hill or another, across or round piazzas until we had traipsed the whole of the area and arrived back to where we had started - without once getting a decent whiff of some local amber fluid!

For two hours we traipsed the streets of Malta and we were drooling at the mouth. Eventually, whilst busily dehydrating, we decided to head back to the only place that had shown signs of life, a sort of cinema complex in the middle of nowhere. And there a kindly girl pointed us in the right direction. One hour later and extremely parched we saw a dim neon sign, far away and creaking in the evening breeze!

Funnily enough had we turned left instead of right when leaving the vessel we would have hit downtown Malta and the active night life but .........that is another story.

The first real signs of the bars existence on planet earth was a dull glow from a half-shuttered doorway and a swinging neon sign that creaked ominously and uninviting. Peering inside and adjusting our eyes to the single ten-watt bulb that hung dangerously low from the ceiling, it was ascertained that the Bamboo Cage Bar was in fact a Bar and that it was after-all open for business.

Two customers sat at a table by the door. Ignoring our entrance they sat hunched over their glasses of beer and puffed smoke into a cloud that already hung below waist level. A discussion of the nights take, drug pushers taking a break or just two friends catching up on life? They certainly were not interested in us.

The bar was tiny, three tables at the door, a little bar at the back with three stools crammed against it, a store room of minuscule dimensions and a fridge against one wall that incongruously housed a selection of candy bars and packets of chips. A tiny passage at the back led off to a toilet that had not seen a scrubbing brush in many a decade and a notice about a dog that had large teeth - the dog itself must have been on holiday. The whole area was cast in shadows of dingy browns and yellowed stained patches as the ten watt bulb struggled to pass the light along.

A few square meters of drinking space - eight drinkers would have been a crowd.

The bar resembled a prison cell of a man, cast away on an Island for many a year, with only himself to communicate with. A coat of paint would have done wonders to the bar but then that would have destroyed the works of an unknown writer/artist who had adorned every available space with emotion. All the walls had graffiti scrawled in endless streams on top of the remnants of yellowed paint that had once been white. The bar itself was adorned with thousands of pieces of scrap cardboard with hastily written notices to the public and the spaces in-between filled with further graffiti - words of wisdom, attack on society and the world at large (attack on everybody not currently sitting in that bar). Memories of a lost life intermingled with hastily written poems of love, tributes to loved ones who died in battle displayed harshly next to warnings of death should one not pay for their beer.

This bar did not rise in a day, this was the work of years! This was the Count of Monte Christo in Malta

What the graffiti said ..........

"My arms are old and tired from brushing floors and cleaning up the ****** ashtrays" stated one notice - no apology, no request for others to help! And in accordance with this statement it seemed as if the floor had remained un-swept and the ashtrays glued with time to the table tops.

"You ask me for tax on my car, you want tax for my house, you want money for my bar and more for just living .......... how can I get money if you keep on taking it away from me?" This one seemingly pointed towards the government continued on in a weeping, self-pity mode!

"He died fighting, a young boy of twenty and left a mother behind, did you have to take him away", was scrawled next to........

"You can beat me but not defeat me. Hit me and kick me and I will not fight back, but I don't care, my heart will keep on going". This one in answer to somebody that had beaten him up whilst trying to steal from his bar (he told us this later).

The Author and the Barman ..........

The barman heard me reading one of the 'writings' to my companion and he chuckled in delight. And so our attention turned to him. A wizened little man of about seventy or so: unshaven and doddery and very keen to talk. He told us that he was from Malta but had spent 27yrs working in London in everything from bus driving to house painting. He had returned to Malta to prevent himself being carted off to jail - he had taken (kidnapped his children) to get away from a terror wife.

He talked about Malta as we sipped away on our Cisko Beer (Malta's own brew); he talked about the life as it is today on the Island, the large drug scene, the love that the Maltese have for politics and that most of the younger generation leave Malta when they are old enough to search of work abroad. He would have still been in London had his wife not turned nasty! He talked in stuttering English that had turned rusty over the years, a language only used now in his graffiti, for all to read except those from Malta who never learnt English.

Old, wise and cackling away is how I remember him.

His graffiti skills where born many years ago when he first opened up this broom cupboard bar. And it was all a side effect of alcohol, too much of it and an unrequited frustration for the world at large. He initially started writing small notices, to try and keep his back street bar in order: gentler versions of the "ashtray" warning having long since turned into larger and more vehement postings. Then after endless trouble caused by drunken youths his anger and his etchings became lengthier and more prominent, traversing from little pieces of cardboard to large signs and then to the black marker pen graffiti on the walls. And as time went on and more drunken nights ensued he would fortify himself with alcohol and the walls slowly became tributes to the written word and to whatever problems or thoughts had stuck in his addled mind - long after the doors had locked for the night.

I mentioned to this wizened writer that seeing as how the walls were nearly filled from top to bottom that he should start on the ceiling. This part of the bar could have done with some attention as the paint was all but gone and the remaining flakes occasionally floating down to land in ones beer. He had though stopped writing years ago, soon after one fateful night when he was balanced drunkenly on a table top, trying to relieve himself of a built-up frustration that was liberally laced with whisky. The table gave way and he ended up in hospital with a broken leg. After that accident he decided to hang up his pen for good and to lay his bitterness to rest. He told us, "I have said it all, there is nothing left to say".

His past bitterness was by no mean apparent in his conversations, he was in fact a very happy man and content to while away the evening with us. At one point when I asked if a certain item was five dollars he broke up into cackles of laughter and bent up double in mirth. Turns out that my five dollars should have been five cents, not so funny to us but he got good value from my mistake.

The rest of the evening......

Well, that was the Bamboo Cage Bar. My friend and I stopped there for three beers before heading on down town for a more civilized drink in a more up-market establishment. Our kindly barman had pointed us in the right direction for a taxi to take us there and we made our escape, hoping that no graffiti would result in our wake!

Funnily enough, we happened to pass his establishment on the way back to our ship. He was busy trying to shut the door against the weight of a sozzled ex-customer who had trouble standing up and as he smiled so happily upon seeing us we decided to have a last beer with him. We further made his day by spending all of our remaining Maltese Pounds on Candy Bars from his fridge - must have been the largest daily intake that he had ever had.

It was this last visit to the bar that brought an answer to something that had been niggling away at the back of my mind since I had first seen that swinging neon sign, the one that promised so little yet held so much. What is The Bamboo Cage Bar name all about?

Standing at the bar and sipping the last of the Cisko Beer I happened to glance downwards. Covering the bars side were some sticks of bamboo. I had not noticed this decoration before, age had long since turned the shoots from light brown and supple looking to dark brown match sticks, and all the gaps were filled in with cigarette ash, dirt and grime from the many years of service. The spaces were so completely filled that the surface of this bar covering was almost flat. Many years ago the bamboo would have stood out and might have been the center piece but time had cured that and without peering closely one might never know why the Bamboo Cage bar was named thus.

So without stutter the Bamboo Cage Bar came into being. Whether the name came first and the bamboo second or the bamboo was some past relic of a failed enterprise I will never know! I will also always wander how a Maltese Londoner came up with a idea of a Hawaiian theme bar, one that sat alone and forlornly at the top of the hill in suburban Malta, but that I may never know!