A week’s holiday doesn’t make me any sort of authority on the country, but I can offer some opinions.

On account of not having much money, there being nothing to do other than boxing or joining the IRA’s youth wing and Belfast being bloody dangerous, I spent far too many of my teenage evenings listening to shortwave radio. I was one of Radio Moscow’s top correspondents, was the proud owner of a Radio Sweden T shirt and used to get Vatican Radio’s programme schedule posted to me. Even then, when I was applying neat Dettol to my pimples and wondering if I would ever, ever have a girlfriend, I had developed an appreciation of the importance of political pluralism that has stuck with me.

All these stations could be received pretty clearly and, as far as I could tell, were fairly sensible. However, when atmospheric conditions permitted, I could sometimes catch Radio Tirana. I didn’t quite grasp the nuances of their condemnations of the Chinese Communist Party, but I could work out that they were scary and bonkers. The people on Radio Moscow went out of their way to be nice and would send exciting and unexpected gifts in the post. They didn’t say things like “The Chinese make a friend of any state, any person, whether Trotskyite, Titoite, or a Chiang Kai-shek man.”

Albania was the most unhinged of the Stalinist regimes in Europe, and it is only seeing up close and hearing from people who lived through the Enver Hoxha decades that you appreciate what a brutally grotesque caricature of socialism it was. Its internal regime was infinitely more repressive than East Germany or Poland. The Communist Party earned its legitimacy with its role in fighting the Nazis, but in the first post-war election voters had only one party on the ballot paper. It is true that, in the typical Stalinist way, they did some progressive things, but the human cost was immense.

For example, the country has thousands of small bunkers and a massive nuclear bunker in Tirana. This was dug out by hand by conscripts and it isn’t known how many died constructing it. Any criticism of the regime meant prison and torture. Religion was banned and while the upper bureaucracy lived a life of privileged luxury, the working class was hyper exploited.

Let’s fast forward to 2025.

More than any other Europeans, Albanians are stigmatised in the British press because they want to move abroad for a better life. Young Albanians would love to be part of the European Union. Many of them want to live in Britain for a while because they speak English and see wage levels there for menial jobs as really attractive. Immigrants know how to calibrate their expectations.

There doesn’t seem to be much in way of industry, and you see groups of men hanging around killing time. Tourism is the major growth sector, and plush new developments are being built where there are good beaches. Allegedly, Trump junior is in talks with the Socialist Party government about developing an island as a resort. That is a fast track to recolonisation for a country which has been occupied by the Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Italians and Germans.

I can say with some confidence that you can ignore all the racist guff in the press about all Albanians being criminals. It is a very relaxed country where most people are non-practising Muslims and there is no problem having a ham sandwich and a beer in a pavement café during Ramadan. Humanity reasserted itself over Stalinism and that is an achievement.