There is a spot of bother in Sliema about a flat that is being used as a mosque. The neighbours have been complaining about it for years, and now they have decided to file a judicial protest. Earlier, they had turned for assistance to the Malta Environment and Planning Authority which instructed the owner and tenant of the flat to stop using it for that purpose. The owner and tenant appealed, and lost – not once, but twice. Since losing the last appeal almost two years ago they have carried on regardless, still using the flat as a centre of Islamic prayer.

It appears now that the Environment and Planning Authority is in a bit of a diplomatic quandary. If it sends its people in to close the place down, it may find itself accused of anti-Islamic action and of religious fundamentalism. Some people to whom I have spoken say that the authority should not be unduly concerned about this, but then these people inevitably go on to give the wrong reason why the authority should not give two hoots about religious questions.

They say, angrily, that if they were to try and open a Catholic church in an Islamic state, it would be shut down immediately, and they would be harassed. Quite apart from the fact that this is not correct – it all depends on which Islamic state they are talking about; churches and synagogues have co-existed with mosques in Moslem countries throughout the history of Islam – the cliché holds that two wrongs do not make a right and that an eye for an eye is a philosophy that belongs in the Old Testament.

If the people of some countries behave in a fundamentalist and undesirable manner, then we have to make doubly sure that we are more enlightened. The correct reason why the Environment and Planning Authority should ignore subtle intimations of religious blackmail is that nobody and no one is above the law, and nobody and no one should be accorded that unofficial status of being above or outside the law on grounds of political, religious or family connections or status.

If the owner and tenant of the flat are not permitted to use it as a mosque, then that is the end of the story. In line with the regulations they should stop using it for that purpose, and identify another building to be used in this way, but desist from using it until they have clearance.

There is another side to all this. Those who are objecting should be clear in their minds that their objections are based on the high traffic flow of strangers which is the inevitable result of one flat being used as a place of worship, and not because of feelings of prejudice towards Moslems. People going in and out and praying loudly cause a certain amount of disturbance and annoyance to those who live in the other flats.

I do not blame them for being so irritated; I would be just as bothered. Having neighbours is, on the whole, a great inconvenience and most undesirable, and it is best to try not to have them at all, if possible – still less neighbours who pray very loudly when you are not at all religious, or do not share their particular religious sentiments.

Happy-clappy Christians and members of the ever-sprouting Catholic revival groups, who sing and shout and pray at the top of their voices, can be just as bothersome, but in cases like this, the neighbours are loath to complain to the Environment and Planning Authority. The main reason is that they often know the God Be Praised-ers on a personal basis, and do not want to be thought rotten spoilsports or seen as nasty types.

The second reason is that they are Catholic, or at least Christian, too, and so they feel a little odd objecting to a particular manifestation of their own religion. The third reason, and here is where it all falls down, is that these meeting-places for loud prayer groups are not called ‘churches’ and so do not need a licence or permit from any authority to operate as such. If they are churches at all, it is in the original meaning of the first Christians who met in small groups in each other’s homes, to praise God and talk about Christ. That original meaning has since been lost, and our regulations look on a church as being a particular kind of building used for a very specific purpose.

A household I know well was deeply inconvenienced over several months by the howls of praise and glory emanating from a flat over on the other side of the narrow street where they live. The flat was at the time being used by one of these Catholic revival movement groups which are fine if you are actually in them, but which test to the limit the tolerance of everyone who is not.

The singing, chanting, cheering and AA-type confessions bothered the members of this household so much that they were forced to leave the building for long walks while the sessions were taking place. They are fortunate that they no longer have teenagers in residence, for these would have been hanging out of the balcony windows, mock-chanting, hysterically sniggering and passing a rude running commentary, regarding the goings-on chiefly as entertainment.

This flat is just round the corner from that being used as a mosque, which means that the neighbours were rather awkwardly sandwiched between the Allah u Akbars and the Allelujiahs, each lot giving it all they have got. It certainly makes things a lot more interesting than the days when the only signs of religious life in that quarter were the slowly tolling bells of Stella Maris church and the black-veiled old ladies in the front pews.

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Now that the cold unpleasant weather has passed, soon to make way for the hot unpleasant weather, perhaps the powers-that-be will break briefly from their laboratory dissection of the local council election results (well, hello Lilliput) and prepare for the onset of next winter. It will be no use pretending to be caught unawares, because winter, like Christmas, comes round with astonishing regularity. With no long-term planning, we are going to have more scenes, more panic about gas cylinders, and more people shivering because they cannot afford, in the 21st century, to heat their homes properly. By planning, I do not mean ensuring that there is an unfailing supply of gas cylinders. The time of gas cylinders is past.

The cost of electricity has rendered prohibitive its use for heating – even if it were efficient, which it is not, and even if the supply could take an increase in demand without blowing, which it cannot. When even the existing number of air conditioners and electric radiators are switched on at once through the island, we have a black-out lasting several hours in central areas.

Demand for electricity should be dampened, rather than encouraged. Paraffin has been rendered largely unaffordable because, since the upsurge in price, it now costs roughly Lm200 a month to keep a smallish house warmish round the clock. That is the entire income of someone on the minimum wage, but those who are not comfortably off should not be condemned to shivering in their own homes.

Wood? This is Malta, and there is almost none available. At Lm3 for a sack of logs, it is also out of the question for round-the-clock heating. That leaves gas, and over the last season it has been made amply clear that the current system cannot be used in perpetuity. It has been an anachronism for rather too long already. Pending the invention of some wonder fuel-free heating system, we will still be lugging gas cylinders 50 years from now unless proper plans are made and kept, by those who are put into government precisely for this kind of reason: to organise on our behalf the things we cannot individually or collectively organise for ourselves.

When I mention piped gas, people laugh out loud. “Oh,” they say, “but that will mean pulling up all the roads again, and the pavements. Think of the chaos! And where will the government get the money, anyway? You’re dreaming.” That is a sad indictment of the state of affairs in this country, is it not, when the central heating that others have had for many decades is ‘dreaming’. This kind of reasoning makes me very angry indeed. The streets have been pulled up so many times in the past 15 years, and it is truly amazing that nobody stopped and said: “Wait! What about piping for gas?” They obviously thought we would be lugging around cylinders and jerry cans for the rest of time, or that we would be content to live for the rest of our lives in damp, cold conditions just as our forefathers had done.

Also, so what if the roads are pulled up? It is a one-time sacrifice and then we are sorted. The problem here is that ‘pulling up the roads’ means something different in Malta to what it means in more advanced civilisations. We are wary of any infrastructural work that involves ‘pulling up the roads’ because, once a road is ‘pulled up’ it stays that way for three years. Yet that is unacceptable inefficiency and not an unalterable fact of life.

Oh, to enter a new form of civilisation (well, new to us, anyway) where fuel for central heating, for heating water, and for cooking, is on tap and metred, with a monthly bill from the utility provider. Oh, what bliss to just walk into a house that is kept warm without the need to lug portable heaters around to strategic points, heaving cans of fuel, chasing fuel vendors … over the past few days, my release from the relentless paraffin duty of the last four months has seemed like a holiday. That we are still dreaming of this in 2005, when so many boasts are made about our ‘advanced’ infrastructure, is most perturbing.

The other day, I was reading through some of my collection of Good Housekeeping magazines from the late 1960s. They are packed – and I mean packed – with advertisements for central heating systems provided by the British Gas Board and by private heating companies. North Sea gas was about to be piped into the towns, cities and villages of Britain and the government appeared determined to ensure that as many homes as possible would have gas-fuelled central heating. Page after page in these magazines is covered with advertisements trumpeting ‘unlimited hot water’, ‘homes that are warm from wall to wall’, ‘outside it’s winter but inside it’s summer’ and then the one showing a skinflint freezing in his own home: “Poor Fred – he thinks central heating is expensive. He hasn’t spoken to British Gas.”

I was a toddler when those magazines were published, and as I sat reading them, I was forced into the awareness that heating conditions in Maltese homes – now, 40 years after people in Britain were hauled into the central heating age – are what they were in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.

No doubt, this is one decision that the government will put off ad infinitum, because the demands in time, money, organisation and planning are far too much. This is aside from the fact that the government appears to have embraced the Mintoffian principle that heating is a luxury which we can very well do without, or use only intermittently, for the two hours we are at home in the evening, and then at a considerable cost in terms of money and inconvenience.

I remember when Dom Mintoff thought the same of washing-machines, cars, computers, and telephones, and we thought he was a dinosaur who belonged behind the Iron Curtain.