It turns out that this was not the warmest winter on record, but the warmest in the last 52 years. The Meteorological Office has informed us that the winter of 1955 was even warmer. So much for the panic about global warming, and thank heavens records are kept because human beings appear to have a restricted memory span.

* * *

Dom Mintoff and his daughters have headed off to the European Court of Justice to seek redress against the government of Malta. The Lm360,000 that the court here awarded them as compensation for having a power station built next to one of their many homes is not enough. They want more. What a greedy-guts this man is. The rest of us reeled with surprise when he got this unprecedented amount of compensation, while hanging on to his Delimara house. The surprise was followed by cynical comments. Others have lost their property through requisition and got next to nothing, or had the use of their property stolen from them under our archaic and unjust rent laws. But Mintoff gets Lm360,000 because he doesn’t like his new neighbour the power station and still he wants more. Things like this only serve to remind us how grateful we should be that he is no longer prime minister.

* * *

A man has been arrested and charged with raping the mentally incapacitated 19-year-old daughter of his live-in girlfriend. The girl told a nun what had happened to her – not her mother, tellingly enough – and the nun directed her to a social worker, not to the police. It was the social worker who then took her down to the station to file a report, and the police officer who took that report said in court that the girl was absolutely terrified.

Whenever I read about a case like this, and there are many reported in the British press and increasing numbers in Malta, I wonder why a woman might live with a man who poses a risk to her children. Are some women really so keen to have a man around that any man will do, even one who threatens the health and happiness of their sons and daughters? I’m beginning to think so. There are cases in which the woman’s thinking is so perverted that she actually sees her children as a threat to her relationship, rather than the other way round. If her live-in boyfriend begins to show sexual interest in her 12-year-old daughter, rather than feeling a tide of revulsion and getting rid of him to protect the child, she will round on the girl in sexual jealousy, as though she is some adult rival for the man’s affections. It’s amazing.

So many women have dumped their children or harmed them so as to protect or pursue their relationship with a man. Maybe in years gone by when a woman’s only chance of survival was by living off a man, this was a little bit understandable – though only a little bit, because I think most women I know would rather go hungry on the streets with their kids in tow than dump them in an orphanage while they live comfortably with a man who doesn’t want them. My opinion of the British Labour Minister John Prescott sank long before he was revealed to have been rolling over the sofa with his secretary. Some years before that, the newspapers told the story of how, when he married his wife, she had a five-year-old son in an orphanage. They visited him a couple of times together, but they left him there when they married and never saw him again. I read that, and I thought: “Bloody hell – poor kid. He didn’t have much of a mother and then she didn’t marry much of a man.”

Women’s survival instincts are very strong. It’s what makes so many women utter bitches in getting what they want, which in their constrained thinking and restricted scope of operation usually means the man that they want, the meal ticket. The man becomes the means to an end, even if their children have to pay the price.

We were all horrified by the testimony in the courtroom of the woman whose husband repeatedly raped and sexually abused the little girls they had adopted from Romania. It was they who assaulted him, she said; it was they who tempted him. She made them sound like baby whores when they were only five or six years old at the time. It left me with the lingering suspicion that the children hadn’t been adopted so much as imported for the purpose of the husband’s sexual satisfaction. The girls testified that the sexual assaults began the day after they got to Malta. Yes, so these weren’t the woman’s natural children, but why on earth would a woman want to collude in something so grossly obscene, just to hang on to her husband? It doesn’t even bear thinking about.

Women who put their man before their children – even if that man is the children’s father – are making a big mistake. We expect this kind of behaviour from men, who will often put the interests of their girlfriend or new wife before the interests of their children. It’s what gave rise to the many tales in which a wicked stepmother features prominently. But we don’t expect it from the children’s mother. When a woman exposes her daughter or son to the risk of sexual abuse by the man in her life, she reveals a pattern of thinking that is more widespread than we believe. Women routinely fail to protect their children against the behaviour of the man in the household, because they put him first. Maintaining their relationship with him is more important than safeguarding their children’s interests.

Sexual abuse seems to be the ultimate horror that makes us gasp, but there are other kinds of abuse that can be just as damaging, if not more so. Many children and young people in Malta live in households that are dominated by a violent, controlling and frightening man. We only find out about them when the story ends in tragedy and makes the news, as happened recently, or a couple of years ago when that poor man ended up killing his father in Gozo, resulting in a trial with evidence that shocked the country. A friend tells me that while she was growing up, the man next door routinely beat his sons and locked them in the tiny cupboard beneath the stairs, even when they were grown up enough to leave. She said that her father would often have to intervene, that the boys were like scared, pale rabbits. The mother couldn’t protect them, and eventually she protected herself by packing a suitcase and leaving – without them.

* * *

The government hasn’t done itself any favours by giving in to the shooters’ lobby over the issue of spring-time hunting. We voted for EU membership in the hope that it would force our government to get in line and stamp on these people once and for all. But guess what? Instead of defying the shooters, the government has chosen to defy the EU – and also the hundreds of thousands of Maltese who do not carry guns and use them for fun to shoot robins out of the sky.

The government has sought to pacify us by telling us that it has upped the penalties for illegal hunting. Well, I’m sorry – but I’m not at all impressed. To impose a penalty on somebody, you first have to catch him in the act – or have sufficient proof that he committed the act – and then you have to charge him, prosecute him, and have him found guilty. That’s why, despite the large amount of illegal hunting going on, the halls of our law courts are not exactly packed with shooters facing charges.

Illegal shooters know they are going to get away with it every time, which is why they won’t give a damn even if the fines are upped to Lm100,000 and the confiscation of their homes and families. You just can’t catch them doing it. You can hear and see what is happening: the gun-shots followed by birds falling out of the sky. You can see the results: the dead birds. But you can never see the man who did it. It takes a split second to pull the trigger, and in a place teeming with hunters, nobody is going to be able to follow the trajectory of the shot to work out which hunter shot which bird, or even if he did at all. The whole thing is a joke.

When we saw from our terrace birds of prey in flight during the migration season this time last year, and heard shots ring out all over the valley, a friend who was with us called the police. You do that because you feel helpless, but you also know that it is pointless. How could the police have got hold of the people who did it? Where do you start looking?

I don’t think the government realises how angry people are about this. If it does know and doesn’t care, then that is even more astonishing. I will never begin to understand why it has allowed itself to be held to ransom by a bunch of people whom nobody else likes or approves of, who are in a very tiny minority, and who cannot swing an election. It has chosen instead to incur the wrath of the very people who will swing the election – the ones who are fed with the government and for whom this is the last straw.