I was thumbing through the most recent restaurant guide the other day, when I happened upon a new category. This year they have awarded golden pedestals to the cleanest, most sanitary restaurant WCs in Malta and Gozo. Bravo. Well done. Just what we need... appropriate recognition for the war on crabs. I was impressed, no truly.

Then I thought, that's all very well... but, what about all those disgusting, insanitary bogs out there? What do they get? (apart from bacterial meltdown).

I scanned the pages several times, but no, nothing, zilch. These spectacularly squalid harbingers of dysentery, were completely overlooked... ignored. And there are quite a few people on this island who seem rather challenged when letting nature take its course.

So, with my public service hat on... yet again, Sylvanus would like, here and now, to rectify this heinous omission. I shall give my own awards (a beautifully inscribed plastic lavatory brush and holder) one each to the three foulest, most diseased and unapproachable lavvies in our archipelago:

Starting with the john-under-the-stairs at the Friend to None Bar, Buskett. This is undoubtedly the third worst schizerhausen in the Maltese islands. In fact, the foul-smelling discharge oozing from the cracks in its beige ceramic bowls (they used to be white but... hey) is said to be sufficiently plentiful and potent to fertilise all the orange trees within a circumference of three kilometres. It loses a few points, because the last time I visited, some idiot had thought it necessary to actually leave a toilet roll in one of the cubicles. The fact that said roll was on the floor, wallowing in four inches of slurry and therefore totally unusable, is irrelevant.

But in all other respects this bog really fits the bill. It is said that during the hottest days of summer, even the bar's most insensitive customers have been known to give it a miss and take a leak in the stock room over the crates instead.

Oh yes, the john-under-the-stairs at the Friend to None is right up there with some of the nastiest on the planet.

But it still comes in third behind my second choice. The out-the-back bog at Geronimo's Grill and Health Hazard is something else. It used to be much photographed by disbelieving tourists. Less so today, since only the brave or the olfactorily impaired can get within a hundred metres of it... even with a grigal taking some of the stench in the opposite direction.

It is a little gem of mid 20th century sanitary architecture. A far from pristine example of the ejja h'amorru school of latrine design. One of its owner's proudest boasts is that to date, over 16 people have gone missing after daring to assume the seated position within its portals. Among the locals it's known as the "Trainspotting" dunny, after that famous sequence in the movie of the same name.

Another rather charming aspect of this particular privy is the floor. And no, I'm not referring to the tiles... in a subtle shade of decomposing walrus... no, its more their surface consistency I'm referring to. Years of intoxicated inaccuracy have rendered their surface just about as slippery as a... as a decomposing walrus. Many are the unsuspecting punters who, when caught short, gallop ingenuously through the door marked gen** (the last two letters fell off in 1955 and 1963) then find themselves off and spinning like Torvill and Dean, until gravity or a strategically sited pre-war contraceptive dispenser, brings them crashing to earth... or rather, crashing to excrement.

Oh yes, Geronimo's is well worthy of second place.

And the winner of the title of the most revolting dirtbox in Malta... if not the whole of the Mediterranean can be found in: Parrum. Parrum. Spiro's Pizzeria and Sewage Outlet, Hal Far. This is sheer class. Spiro can truly boast a dump-house of deep distinction. I have personally seen cockroaches in there the size of the Trojan horse... I tell you, in this kakpipe even the rats wear surgical masks.

It is a true part of our heritage. Spiro insists that the words: "Kilroy was here", still to be seen, scrawled in excrement over the urinals, date back to Neolithic times. My award is by no means the first. Spiro can already boast a Michelin turd and he's also received a citation from the Marie Curie Centre, for services to epidemiology.

Congrats Spiro, yours is truly the vilest boghole of them all.