I think this world is going all topsy-turvy. I used to be proud to live in a country where morals and ethics were applied with appropriate common sense – but it seems this is slowly, and sadly, disappearing.

To kits and kids then. Some bright minds in our community are studying the possibility of allowing same sex couples to adopt children. The argumentation (which is difficult to fault in this regard) is that a loving home with one-on-one attention is probably more important than the sexual bias of the parents.  There is however the very real issue that this is not the normal/natural (or whatever word takes your fancy) method for children to be brought up and thus one must be very careful to take the kids’ health, safety and happiness first and foremost into consideration when looking into this (not parents). The same could be said to the abnormal procedure of freezing embryos (future kids) so as to have a convenient store of potential babies on demand.

However, while contemplating on letting kids be taken into household without a father or mother for their own good, it seems that taking kittens into a similar household where they will be loved and cared for is not good enough. We have to also ensure that they are given unnaturally comfy surroundings. I recently tried to adopt three kittens from various volunteers at different cat sanctuaries and homes. The idea was to care for them, allow my kids to learn how to love animals and have pets that they could themselves love and do my bit for animal kind.

Since I am not your standard cat-crucifying psycho, I also gave my address and phone number to the good-hearted volunteers so they could (as they said) come and check that the kittens are doing well.

I could have given them totally false data and then gone crucify all three kittens as they did not ask for any documentation to confirm my details.

A couple of days later, two of the volunteers turned up. I invited them into our internal yard where the kittens (which we had just played with that morning, my two kids aged 4 and 7 and me) were playing. It had rained the night before so there was some soil and water on the floor.

The two volunteers tut-tutted at the state they (and more importantly the yard) were in, the fact that they had spent a night in the rain (it had truly rained that night) despite the fact there were three purpose placed shelters in the yard all of which were bone dry. They picked them up and “rescued them” from our house, deaf to the wailing of my besotted kids seeing their pets being taken away.

Keeping my temper as best I could, I went back after them to the Senglea shelter to discuss the possibility of being given another chance (and feeling like some sedqa sanctioned child abuser). They blatantly turned me down despite the fact that they easily admitted that I was not in any way an abuser and could not be reported for what I had done. It was just that I did not live up to their standard of keeping the kittens inside all the time. Yes – you heard right – the outdoors in which all kittens were born, since well before Adam and Eve (till a few people with not much to do started keeping cats inside to pet, groom and overfeed) was not good enough for the poor darlings. This despite them being kept away from older cats who could give them cat flu, despite more than sufficient water and food and most importantly love. But no – we did not live up to the expectations of these two do-gooders so we were relieved of our charges. I will not even get into their discussions of using antibiotics to treat cat flu (a viral infection that does not respond to antibiotics) and helping enhance the deadly resistant superbug population on our beautiful island.

I began to wonder – is there a commission for cat and animal care – and does it suggest or set standards – since the ones I received obviously had more to do with the personal fancies of the volunteers involved. For example, while these fine persons mentioned above had no issue with giving our family kittens, initially, another asked for my children’s age and then told us they were too young (based on what law I do not know). The same person told us that for her to give us an adult cat, we had to tell her when we would be home for at least a whole day!! I shudder at the idea of Ms X invading our privacy for a whole eight or so hours checking on our interactions with Mr Pussycat and vetting us. So that poor cat lost his chance. By the way I have these comments on e-mail or SMS should someone want to query them.

So, just in case I am giving the wrong impression, I am all for loving animals (within limits – would love to see what these same do-gooders would do to cockroaches or mice in their beds), and though I believe that these volunteers provide an important and special service, I think we should not miss the wood for the trees. 

When one of them told me for the umpteenth time that the yard our kittens were in was dirty, I replied (with a bit too much passion since she was lambasting my good wife) that like me (and unlike some other people – you can guess who I was alluding to), my wife worked full time and she had just cleaned the yard the day before the rain. The do-gooder shut up.

I hope and pray that we will not become a nation like our ex-colonisers, the great and good UK, where cats and dogs are treated like royalty but humans can be frozen, chopped up, vacuumed to bits and experimented on. Long live the Queen.

On to depression – my colleagues at university will tell you that if one is given electrical shocks for no apparent reason – if one cannot work out a pattern as to how to avoid these shocks s/he will get depressed.

Now trying to get my children to school from our home in the beautiful south (this administration’s stronghold) is a daily invitation to depression. For the past year or so, the timing of the traffic lights at Marsa’s great crossroads (just down from the Addolorata cemetery) has been played about with like a kaleidoscope. No sooner have you decided that for some reason, the stream down from Tarxien is being held back unnecessarily and you divert your routine through Corradino Hill, then suddenly someone turns the traffic signals round so that the Tarxien flow is almost continuous and that from Corradino is put on a long, slow boil.

If that is not enough to induce hypertension, then going past university to the famous “tank tal-gas” roundabout has become a similar but additional Russian roulette. Not because of traffic lights. These caused such an uproar a number of years ago that they were rapidly dismantled. Now it depends on the whims of the policemen directing traffic. If they do it well, you sail through the roundabout and the preceding road. If they have got the wrong timing, then the cars from the south are backed up all the way till before the diversion to university and Mater Dei.

The idea of removing traffic lights was not to replace them with human traffic lights and cause twice as much frustration.

When is someone (ADT or whoever) going to transplant those elongated palms and build a flyover?

Till then, will someone pass the Prozac?