Or Wounded Pride, more likely, that which your correspondent Daphne Caruana Galizia still feels after having lost to the Cowboy in the first showdown at the Okejn Corral, over two years ago. This victory came despite support from a deputy correspondent riding shotgun. Yeee Haw! (now with my pony tail I would say I look more like a Red Indian than a cowboy).

For she starts her article (TMID, 11 August) with a super-annuated jibe at my establishment, and continues to convey unsolicited and unpaid-for advice to me and my fellow restaurateurs de Malte.

A ‘back-seat diner’, as it were.

Daphne could not help but throw in a recipe, you know, easy to do at home, just to spite the restaurants.

Busy as I am, contemplating the effect that my salads may have on the prominent of these Isles, I would not have written had I not seen Daphne’s astounding declaration: “Whenever I see a pushchair in a restaurant, I try to leave and go somewhere else.”

Now, please, fellow purveyors to the peckish, before you make a rush to the attic to root out some old pushchair to be trotted out once some nosey parker appears at the gate, could you please reply to this question?

Whom, (if you had the choice – that is), would you prefer to serve? A happy family spending quality time at your establishment, while their marital bliss (so short-lived these days) lasts, mostly cemented by that person occupying the pushchair? Or someone glaring at your staff as if they were something that just leaked out from your grease-trap?

Ironically, today my first clients were a couple with their chuckling, tittering two year-old child with pushchair. All my other guests were smiling at the tiny diner. Yet, Daphne hates to be forced to look at babies. I hear that torture can be very painful, but I cannot imagine how one can be forced to look at babies.

Babies are perhaps the only bright light still left in this today’s miserable world. With normal loving parents, they enhance their pleasure of sharing the little leisure time today’s life-style leaves one, and should not be “dispatched”, to use Daphne’s term, to grannies or nannies, also after working hours.

I would not dream of putting up a sign, no babies allowed, as if on a par with no dogs allowed.

Martin Baron

Proprietor, Café Deux Baronnes

VALLETTA