I am sometimes astonished at the sort of case that excites the imagination of the crowd. Two stories caught my attention in the newspapers yesterday. One of them was about a constitutional case filed by a 26-year-old woman who was born a man, and who is being prevented from marrying by some officious upstart at the Public Registry. The other was about a judicial protest filed by a woman who lives and works in a house hard by the Senglea church, and who is being driven crazy by the chimes that break out of the church clock every 15 minutes. I read the newspapers on-line, and always check the comments beneath, where this facility is available, to see what people are thinking. There was a storm of commentary beneath the Senglea chimes story, and not a single comment beneath the other one. Somewhere, somehow, the question of persistent noise had struck home, divisively of course, and people were driven to – oh dear – sound off. Clearly, they weren’t as exercised by the pompous petty officialdom that makes an unmarried person unmarriageable simply because she was born a man and is now a woman, and the people at the Public Registry don’t know which gender box to tick.

The chimes comments were fascinating, bringing all sorts of apparently unrelated issues into what should be a simple decision based on whether the sound of the bells is indeed above the EU-mandated decibel level and a public nuisance. Suddenly, it was all about tradition, being Maltese, support for the church and Catholicism, petards, planes landing and taking off, and bossy interfering women who should put up and shut up or failing that, sell up and move house. Oh, and why doesn’t she put in double-glazing? And why doesn’t the Curia pay for the expense? Oddly, most of the people commenting appeared to have understood that the fuss was all about church-bells and not about clock-chimes, and so went ballistic at the thought that this nosy woman was trying to eradicate the bells bit from the description of Malta as a place of yells, bells and smells. As for the trials of those who live in the flight path, nobody seemed to make the less than fine distinction between the necessity of an international airport and the total frivolity of loud clock-chimes every 15 minutes.

I appreciated, in particular, these two comments. Peter Mifsud: “Shame Ms Spiteri you think that you are a Pulita trying to ruin everything what is Maltese.” Joe Borg: “Prosit. Why don’t we now dump our language, the festa, the flag, the national anthem and the maltese islands will be called by another name so that we will be sure that anything which is Maltese and other old traditions will be lost forever.” If you want lots of examples of irrational thinking and brilliant non sequiturs, the comments section beneath the stories on the on-line version of The Times is a great resource. Tradition, eh? So a church clock that chimes very loudly every quarter of an hour is now a tradition. It won’t be long before the same people are out in force claiming that buses and perambulating car-wrecks churning out black fumes are also a tradition, and that those who wish to have them removed on the grounds that they are a health hazard should be corralled with the blacks (who also represent a threat to tradition) and left there.

I know Anna Spiteri, the woman who filed the judicial protest about the Senglea church. She taught me geography for archaeology at university, and she is as far removed as possible from the popular idea of an interfering housewife with nothing better to do. She is a scientist and so, when investigating the decibel level of the annoying chimes, she took the scientific approach and didn’t merely protest that they were getting on her nerves. She researched the maximum permissible decibel level in an area such as hers, called in a professional to calculate the decibel level of the once-every-15-minutes chimes, and then tried working things out with the parish priest and the local authorities. Her arguments – oh dear again – fell on deaf ears. So she called in the lawyers, and now we have to see what comes next. I think it will be silence, though not from the clock.

I happen to agree with Anna Spiteri and not with the clock-chime-fanciers. She was living there almost 20 years before the manic clock arrived as a millennium gift to the parish. The chimes have nothing to do with the glorious celebratory bells that are such a welcome sound when heard once a week on a (late) Sunday morning or after a wedding or festive celebration. They are an electronic nuisance, the clock equivalent of the computerised voice on GPS systems in cars (“Recal. Cul. Ating. Turn. Left. After. 300 metres.”). They have nothing to do with tradition, and nor does the clock.

Ms Spiteri is right. Let’s say that it wasn’t a church next door, but a house, and a man with a clock fetish moved in and installed a clock, just like the one the church has, on his faccata. The police and the boys from MEPA would be round within 24 hours, demanding that he removes it on the grounds that it is disturbing the public peace. But the church is allowed to make as much noise as it likes. The very loud chimes went off every 15 minutes right through the day and night at first. Imagine trying to sleep with an alarm clock going off every quarter of an hour right through the night. Wouldn’t you be driven crazy by this kind of Japanese World War II POW camp torture? The parish priest saw reason about this one and agreed to have the clock programmed to stop chiming after 11pm, even though lots of people in Senglea are asleep long before then, especially in the winter.

The obvious question here is: what are these chimes for? In centuries gone by, church-bells – not necessarily church-clocks – marked the hour, and some of them the quarter-hour, because clocks were very costly and sophisticated items that only wealthy merchants and princes could afford, and watches did not exist, still less mobile telephones. People told the time by looking at the sun or listening out for the church bells. In important harbours like Malta’s, a gun was fired at noon so that any ships in port could adjust their time-keeping devices. But now everyone wears a watch or carries a mobile telephone that tells them the time, and the church has lost entirely its time-announcing function. Before, it provided a useful service. Now, it merely drives us nuts.

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“Standing stiff after a full-on show that saw Simon Le Bon being what he was when the 1980s afforded him teen-idol status, the singer admitted he was in agony from back pain and had had to lie down, call a doctor and get a Voltaren injection just before hitting the stage” – from a newspaper report about Duran Duran’s performance in Malta a couple of days ago. Sigh. Sic transit gloria mundi. And in this anti-smoking age, the lit cigarette lighters held aloft during a ‘moving anthem’ have been replaced with “a carpet of mobile phones, lit simultaneously” and waved about in the air during the song called Save A Prayer. What price religion?