Roderick Galdes, the PS for Animals, is working really hard to justify his salary and the cost of running his secretariat. Some weeks ago he held a fund-raising concert at Girgenti Palace with the Second First Lady of Malta, Mrs Michelle Muscat, and raised the grand sum of €214 for each of 14 animal charities.

Now he has done something equally impressive: billboards that tell us which beaches are “dog friendly”. They are in English and Maltese and both languages are thoroughly massacred, so badly that the meaning of some warnings is lost entirely.

One warning, for instance, means to tell you that dog excrement must be picked up immediately. Instead, it tells you that if your dog fouls the beach, it will be carted off immediately (presumably to dog prison, there to await trial).

The Maltese plural of ‘bay’ is given once as ‘bajjej’ and then again as ‘bajjiet’, excrement is at times ‘faeces’ and then ‘solid discharge’, and the definite article is used in places where English, unlike Maltese, never uses it: “the dogs” (il-klieb) instead of “dogs”.

Even the description “dog friendly bays” is totally wrong. Apart from the hyphen, which has gone AWOL, all bays are dog-friendly. There isn’t a single bay in these islands that isn’t just brilliant and safe for dogs to run around on, and they love them all. What these charlatans mean is ‘Dogs are permitted in this bay’.

And that brings me to the use of ‘bay’, which is, if we’re speaking proper British English, wrong too. Maltese uses ‘bay’ for practically every beach I can think of, whether it actually is a bay or not. ‘Ramel’, ‘blat’, ‘bahar’ – all those seem to have been substituted by the ubiquitous ‘bajja’. Now even the open sea and exposed coast at White Rocks is a ‘bajja’. In English, you would normally say ‘beach’ not ‘bay’: dogs are banned on this beach; dogs are permitted on this beach; I’m going to the beach (not ‘to the bay’); I’m on the beach (not ‘in the bay’); he’s gone to the beach (not ‘to the bay’).

The thing is, you just have to give up, don’t you? Roderick Galdes, like most of the rest of his heap, was unfit for purpose when voted into power. It’s pointless expecting great things, or even proper spelling and grammar, from him. I never quite understood it would be this bad, though. The mistakes on that ‘dog friendly’ signage are so glaringly obvious that as soon as the launch – yes, he actually had a launch – was reported in the news, they began doing the rounds on the internet and particularly social media. So you’d think that if PS Galdes didn’t notice, then perhaps one of his aides might have done.

Incidentally, I find the cartoonish dog and the ‘we’re-so-cute’ design of this signage almost more offensive than the massive, multifarious grammar and spelling errors. Because dogs are involved, they felt they have to be kooky like Moira Delia with her dogs with ribbons and Marlene Mizzi with her cats with little clothes. The rest of the world – or that part of it which hasn’t only just discovered dogs as pets, rather than as things to be kept on the roof or chained up in a chicken-coop – treats dog signage like it does all other signage. You get a black silhouette of a retriever or similar, with a red diagonal bar through it when dogs are banned and no red diagonal bar when dogs are permitted. And you get a couple of other icons, which every civilised person knows to mean: 1. pick up your dog-dirt, and 2. put it in a bin.

On a trip to China some years ago, I amused myself by photographing the absolutely hilarious signs you find everywhere, translating Chinese warnings into English. Another few years of Labour, and English-speaking tourists will be doing the same in Malta.

Perhaps we should address the PS for Animals in a language he might understand. Roderick, the sign it is bad. The Maltese it is bad and the English it is badder. And the solid discharge it is for to make laugh.

It would take this man to launch the silly season with a whimper