The Ministry of Finance doesn’t think that there is a national obesity problem. If you’re thin, the ministry can help you get fat. Indeed, that appears to be its intention. It can make you big enough to look terrible in the new high-waisted trousers that fashion has dictated should replace, at last, the bare midriff and thong combination that has been lowering the tone on our streets and in our bars for rather too long. A few days ago, the Ministry advertised its new series of public consultation meetings: “Securing our future… so that no one lacks behind.” There was a number to call, and I trust that many people called it, to put them straight on the fact that, on the contrary, we would rather like to lack a behind. It’s lags, my dears – but the prospect of a public consultation meeting on how to obtain a Jennifer Lopez derrière was quite enthralling.

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A couple of columns back, I wrote about the difference between boys and girls in respect of caution and a sense of danger. The example I gave was that boys who come across an unexploded petard, firework or similar in a field would pick it up to find out what it was, their curiosity overcoming their sense of danger. Girls in the same situation hold back until they know for certain what the object is, and they smell danger at a million paces. Their antennae go on red alert and say: “Don’t touch. Stay back.”

Just a few days after that, I was dismayed to read the news report of a boy who lost one hand and seriously damaged the other one when he found a petard in a valley. Only 24 hours later, another boy was injured after setting alight remnants of petards that he and his friends found in a field.

There are two points to be made here. Boys in general need to have far more sense drummed into them than do girls. Girls appear to have an in-born sense of prudence. Boys appear to be devoid of it. In childhood and the teens, this manifests itself in doing dangerous things with petards. In adulthood, it shows up in saying exactly the wrong thing to the women in their lives, and then wondering why the reaction is towering rage, a stream of insults against their entire ancestry, and a request that they spend the night on the sofa.

The other point is that those who leave petards or the remnants of petards lying around, posing a danger to others, should be made criminally responsible. Yes, it will be difficult to prove who actually left the things there, but there’s nothing like a little light criminal legislation to make these savages sit up and take notice. Boys can be warned not to touch strange objects in fields, but with smaller children, it’s a different matter. Now let’s say there was a family in that field, out on a picnic, with a three-year-old running about and playing. You don’t expect to have to watch a three-year-old in a field in the same way that you have to watch him on the high street.

I call petard-fetishists “savages” because that is precisely how they behave. Last Sunday, at around 10.30pm, what sounded like a bomb explosion ripped across the valley and sent me speeding outside to see where the sound had come from. The festa season is dead and buried for another year, thank God, so I thought it was a bomb, and expected to hear the sounds of sirens within seconds. Instead, I heard another explosion, then another, then another. They went on for one hour, relentless and profoundly disturbing. I worked out that they were coming from the direction of Naxxar, and the next morning, a friend who lives there said that she and her child had been woken from sleep. She had called the police station and was told that there was nothing that could be done, because the petard-exploders had il-permess.

What kind of insane person would give a permit to people to explode petards as loud as bombs for a whole hour at 10.30pm on a Sunday night, in one of the most densely inhabited parts of Malta – particularly when there is no feast being marked? The feast at Naxxar is Il-Vittorja, on 8 September.

I haven’t yet found an explanation for what

happened that night, but I certainly hope there is an arrest: either of the people who spent an hour exploding petards on a Sunday night when people were sleeping in readiness for the next morning’s work – or of the crass and unthinking idiots who issued the permit, if they had one.

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Oh no, somebody has seen the mother of God in Birzebbuga again. She must love the place. Well, I suppose it’s a lot better than Paceville. A man who lives there claims he saw the Madonna holding the palms of her hands together and holding brown rosary beads. What a surprise. Somebody should tell him that’s what is known as an anachronism: rosary beads were invented many hundreds of years after her assumption into heaven. If this man were to take a time machine back to AD30 or so, and hand her his rosary beads, she would think it was a necklace. As for her hands being “together”, where else would they be if not in the pose popularised by a zillion holy pictures and effigies? What are the odds that when he saw her, she was wearing a long Madonna-blue gown and a blue cloak over her head? I’d say those odds are pretty big.

This man says that the Madonna is asking for conversion in Malta “and in the world, particularly in Iran, China, Russia, the USA and Australia.” He listens to the news, at any rate – I’ll give him that.

By some amazing coincidence, as reported in the newspapers, this Angelik Caruana belongs to the family who claimed some months ago that their Madonna effigy had been crying. If I say why I think she was crying, it will sound facetiously blasphemous to some ears, so I won’t. OK, I’ll say it anyway: maybe she was bored in Birzebbuga.

The Archbishop’s Curia has told us not to jump to conclusions, without specifying whether the conclusion it doesn’t want us to jump to is that the Madonna appeared, or that she did not appear. I’m jumping to my own conclusion, thank you, because I really don’t think we need to be examining any evidence here: she didn’t appear. It’s odd how, when these things happen, the Madonna is never wearing the clothes she would have worn, and nor does she look like she would have done. Instead, she looks like one of those little statues they sell as souvenirs: fair of face, with neat tresses and clad in pristine pale blue.

Next time these people choose to see an apparition of the Madonna, they could do some research first, and find out what women looked like and what they wore when they were very poor, in Palestine 2000 years ago. She would have been indistinguishable from the thousands of women enduring life in the Occupied Territories today, and she wouldn’t have worn baby-blue. Any dye was prohibitively expensive in those days, and blues and purples were the most expensive of all, which is why they were the preserve of royalty and the aristocracy.

And that is the very reason why the Madonna was depicted in blue from mediaeval times onwards: because it was the colour of clothing worn by the privileged classes and royalty. Only they could afford it. The Madonna, in her lifetime, could not. An apparition in blue, with a set of rosary beads in her hands, cannot be taken seriously, even if you are inclined to take these things seriously in the first place.