Permit Breaks
Queues, forms and appeals, the ultimate slow holiday.
In a world obsessed with going faster, Malta offers the discerning traveller a rare luxury: the Permit Break, a holiday built entirely around waiting.
Forget the rush of the city break. Here, time slows to the pace of a planning process. Begin your stay by submitting something, anything, and then settle in for the unhurried rhythm of the islands: the request for further information, the re-consultation, the deferral, the deferral of the deferral. There is no need to hurry. Nothing else will.
The Permit Break is wonderfully unstructured. Mornings may be spent refreshing a case portal. Afternoons drift by in the contemplation of a notice pinned to a lamp post. Evenings are for the appeal, yours or someone else’s, and the quiet satisfaction of an objection thoughtfully acknowledged and then comprehensively overruled.
It is, above all, a chance to reconnect with patience. Watch a season turn while a decision matures. Make peace with the fact that the thing you are waiting for and the thing that eventually arrives will bear only a passing resemblance to one another.
Short on time? Then this is not the break for you. The Permit Break rewards only the truly unhurried, and the appeals window is always, blessedly, open.
