On the Dot...

The Americans spent millions of dollars to go to the moon when all they had to do is go to Hurds Bank Street, in Marsascala. The street, apart from resembling a moon crater, also badly needs street lights. Other streets in the area were tarmacked, why not this one?

Reader's Digest

No doubt preparations are under way for the next sessions of Let Me Learn and Hilti sessions, especially since new centres are envisaged where parents and children may congregate to make extra-curricular learning fun as well as giving it the importance it deserves. One hopes that these centres will be made available for other activities, such as lectures for parents and the popular children's writing club.

Fag Ends

There are still unscrupulous shop owners of establishments within walking distance of a school who will supply cigarettes singly. This to say nothing of the tonnes of sweets and packet snacks that are sold to children, who will scoff them instead of lovingly prepared lunches. How far are the rules of each particular school enforced during break? Do teachers not have at least a sense of smell?

Letter Percept

What is the position of local councils with regard to letters, sometimes with documents enclosed, that are sent to them by citizens? Is it possible the clerks are so bogged up with work it takes up to a month for an acknowledgement, never mind a reply, to get through? Incidentally, why are clerks so supercilious when one calls with a query?

Carbon Pepper

The clerks at the Employment and Training Corporation must find their computers a godsend. It is altogether too easy to keep sending the same forms for people to fill in, when all one has to do is depress a couple of keys on one's computer, although one would have replied to the first one of their kind over a week before. Isn't this a waste of trees and human resources?

Far Out

Hal Farrug, specifically the area used as a highway by industrial vehicles, is in a bad state. Some of the street drains are blocked and the whole area has dismal air about it, although some of the residents do their best to keep the environment ship-shape. This area, on the periphery of the region covered by the Luqa local council, seems to be too far from the madding crowd to be cared about.

Mark Their Words

The results of the revision of papers requested by students for their Matsec examinations, ironically, are given to them after they take their re-sits. If the relevant examination boards would hurry the process up just that little bit more, and a better mark obtained after revision than would have been in the original examination, the students would be spared the hassle and stress of having to do it. But it would also mean, perhaps, less income for the board itself.

Action Station

Today is car-free day and a section of the media made much of the "special arrangements" being made for members of Parliament to be able to attend the parliamentary sitting today, although, to be fair, some of them did mention the phrase "public transport", albeit in passing. This would have been a marvellous opportunity for the MPs to fraternise with lesser mortals, whose daily grind often includes four such journeys to and from work, rather than two trips in an airconditioned vehicle.

Uniform-ity

Queuing in the rain for bits and pieces of one's children's uniforms is nobody's idea of fun. Especially when some items are not yet available from a shop, or available only from the different schools or yet another shop, or have to be run up by a seamstress anyway. Every year, different heads of schools say they will be taking care of this stalemate, but somehow, nothing ever gets done and the queues return with monotonous regularity when it is time to switch to summer uniforms.

Yellow Peril

The good news is that Ark, the company that published the yellow pages, will be collecting the old copies of this reference manual for recycling. One hopes that this year, it will go even further in helping the environment, by allowing its employees to collect old telephone and business and other directories that one did not put out for collection the last time around.

Palmed Off

After a summer of suffering drought, the palms along the road into Saint Paul's Bay have been badly hit by the rains. Perhaps the time has come for trees more suitable to that environment to be planted, if these plants are beyond redemption. How about some indigenous trees, about which there was to be a drive some time ago?