You would think that, with such a small population, there would be nothing on the front page but flower shows and the unveiling of plaques – the way it used to be back in the days when we all had to pretend that nothing bad was going on. Well, there’s certainly a lot of front page news these days, with all these stabbings, grisly murders, hauls of drugs and smuggled cigarettes, Chinese people dumped to drown, and corpses floating off Gozo. What are we: Murder Island? I can understand this kind of thing happening elsewhere, but we are supposed to be better behaved, and there are a lot more of them there than there are of us here. We’ve got the population of a smallish town, and the kind of crimes that you don’t want to think about.

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There’s a tightrope to be walked between satisfying the morbid curiosity of readers and treating the dead person like a dead animal. One newspaper carried on its front page a photograph of the police lifting the young man’s corpse off the ground. One policeman had begun to raise the body by the ankles before his colleague did the same by the arms. The picture was taken at that point, and showed the body’s naked legs splayed upwards, while the rest of it was mercifully concealed by wild flowers. Those who loved him – and he was little more than a boy, really – must have been pierced through the heart by the sight of that photograph. Even I was upset and I don’t know him from Adam. I can only hope that friends whisked every copy of that particular edition out of their sight. When people in our small community die in horrible circumstances, is it too much to remember that they have parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, sons, daughters and spouses who should be spared the infliction of even more pain and suffering? It’s so unnecessary, and so unthinkingly cruel. When shocking photographs serve a social purpose, by prodding us into awareness, then yes, they should be published. But publishing this particular picture served no such purpose. The picture was merely pathetic and pitiful, and a source of fresh grief to his family. We didn’t even need to be told that he was in a state of undress, still less shown this fact by means of a graphic picture. You have to be completely devoid of imagination, or terribly innocent and naïve, not to have assumed this without having it spelled out for you.

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The Chinese woman who acted as an intermediary between some of her compatriots and Maltese ferrymen has received a prison sentence of two-and-a-half years for her crime. This is just six months more than a middle-aged Maltese man has received for regularly shoplifting clothes and scent. Well, what can I say? I can understand the leniency towards her, but I cannot understand the comparative severity of the shoplifting sentence. Two years is a long time to spend in jail for the crime of stuffing clothes into your rucksack without paying for them. It’s a lot longer than the suspended sentence thugs have had slapped softly on them for keeping eastern European women as sex slaves after stealing their documents. But that’s our skewed priorities for you. You’d be better off stealing a woman than you would be stealing a woman’s jacket.

This Chinese woman hardly comes across as an evil genius, but more as one of those sad creatures who make bad decisions when they could so easily have made better ones. What really got me was the prison warden’s testimony. She said that Geng Yan had not said a word in six months, and that she sat and stared into thin air. She was sent to Mount Carmel mental hospital for a month, but nothing came of it and the silence and the vacant staring continued. She cannot understand any language other than her own, and probably does not even know what is happening to her. Did she understand what she was accused of, the confession she signed, the proceedings against her in court? I would think she feels about the same as I would, were I to be suddenly swept off the streets in China and whisked into jail, then charged in court, with everyone chattering in Chinese. Surely one or two of the many hundreds of Chinese people who live here could take pity on her, and go and speak to her in her language, so that she is not completely isolated?

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Did I read that court report right? Can it be true that her lawyer argued for mercy on the grounds that her crime affected only the Chinese? As opposed to what – only the Maltese?

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A man went before the parliamentary Social Affairs Committee (see page 7) to describe the poor and haphazard treatment that he and his wife received when they opted for artificial insemination (using his sperm, I hope, though he had no way of knowing this for sure) at a fertility clinic here in Malta. It was not his detailed descriptions of the clinic’s shoddy approach that appalled me, although from these descriptions it sounds as though on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays they stuck syringes up cows and mares, and on Thursdays and Fridays they stuck them up women. This brave person, so un-Maltese in reporting his experience for the benefit of others, rather than seeking to hide how his twins came into being, overlooked what seemed to me the greatest evidence of money-grabbing malpractice. This was the failure of the clinic’s consultants to utter the magic word: “Wait.”

This was not a couple in their mid- to late 30s. The man was just 23 when he and his wife, who must have been the same age or even younger, sought help after failing to conceive. He was told he had a low sperm count. He wasn’t told that, at 23, his sperm count would have to be nought for him to be unable to make his very young wife pregnant. At that age, a woman can conceive almost without knowing how and when it happened, and despite seemingly insurmountable barriers. You wake up one morning and “Oh God, I’m pregnant again.” What kind of a clinic was this, snatching at a couple of walk-ins aged 23, just to get the business? The Brussels clinic where they finally got the success they wished for doesn’t seem much more responsible, either, despite the man’s praise of their professional approach. It didn’t turn the young couple away. Like the sordid Maltese clinic before it, it seized the business. That’s what happens when healthcare is a limited liability enterprise run with an eye to the bottom line: no customer is turned away. You want to spend a little time in a hospital bed, because it’s your fetish? Sure, as long as you pay for it. Do you have a secret hypochondriac kink about medical check-ups and getting lots of attention from people in uniform and important-looking bits of equipment? Go ahead – as long as you or health insurance cough up. Twenty-three years old and not yet pregnant, despite plenty of trying? Come right in, and we’ll pump the little lady full of hormones to get her nice and ready, and if the gentleman here would like to take a seat in this cubicle with a couple of pornographic videos… that’s lovely, thank you. Now we’ll get the syringe to do its job and repeat the process until we hit the jackpot. Sex? Don’t bother, you probably won’t feel like it anyway.

You get the picture. No one patted these two kids on the back and said “For heaven’s sake, you’re just 23. Go home and take it easy. Forget about it. At 23 you don’t want to be rushing around with prams and bottles, anyway. If it doesn’t happen in the next five years, come and talk to us then.” No, of course not – not when there was all that easy money at stake.

And guess what? After having their twins by the arduous process of artificial insemination, the inevitable happened. They forgot about fertility doctors, injections, temperature charts and sperm counts – all of which must kill every last shred of passion and sexual interest, and further reduce the chances of natural conception – and had a baby with no help from anyone but themselves, at the age of 34. It’s happened to so many others before, and it will continue to happen. Babies don’t necessarily arrive when or how we want them to, or even in the right format. The trouble is that we have become so accustomed to ordering things and slotting the delivery into our schedule and life programme that we cannot accept the fact that sons and daughters do not arrive when summoned, like washing machines and bedroom suites. That is the root cause of the problem: we don’t get a baby when we want it, and we rush straight to the baby shop to buy one.