I would like to write about an incident which cannot be allowed to slip by unflagged in relation to the situation a journalist may find herself in within the context of current tensions.

On February 22, I was at a protest organised by the Kalkara Valley Front to take pictures for use in my regular environment column in The Sunday Times. On leaving the group of over a dozen policemen and twice as many protesters, I proceeded alone along a public lane to my car, stopping to take more pictures along the way.

I am increasingly aware of the sudden changes the Kalkara community has had to face in recent months, with rampant development moving in on the formerly docile fishing and farming hamlet. As I walked away from the valley towards the sea, it was this disposition that attracted me to a particular scene that seemed to frame the feelings of the neighbourhood.

A couple with a six-year-old boy were peering over a temporary wall of cement bricks precariously perched at the edge of a cavernous building site bordering a narrow terraced lane of old houses. Having had a major cavity excavated in my gum recently during a botched tooth extraction, I now tend to view many of our building sites as bad dentistry for the planet.

I reached for my newly-purchased little Minolta Dimage to capture the scene as I have automatically done on so many other occasions.

At this point, a man leapt out of a truck and sprinted menacingly in my direction, asking what I was doing there as I stood in the middle of the paved public pathway. He tried to snatch my camera saying he would break it.

My concern at the time was for the camera and the photographs it contained rather than any bodily harm the man was strongly indicating he might perpetrate.

To add insult to injury, when I approached the police to report the incident, he ran ahead of me to be there first, proclaiming himself to be the injured party.

The police were helpful and accompanied me to seek out any witnesses. Of course, no one had seen a thing despite my recollection, at the periphery of the flare-up, of beady eyes peering through balcony windows at the shouting and threatening behaviour.

I did take umbrage, however, to the comment made by one particular police officer, in full view of the gathered crowd, that I was risking it - a woman walking alone. In broad daylight!

I have come across loud, irritable, adrenaline-fed specimens over the years in the course of my work: the breadman who nearly ran me down because I complained of the diesel fumes from his van which he left running for up to four minutes at a time. The well-intentioned response of one neighbour in the street to the incident was: "Why don't you tell him to go under someone else's window!"

Then there were the ungracious hunters and truck drivers with their illegal dumping whose photographs have graced The Sunday Times periodically. But nothing as bad as what I faced at Kalkara. This latest threat in a series is the inedible plastic decoration on the cake. Tension on the developer/protester front is currently seething under a thin layer of referendum.

Hasta la Vittoria.