Like a state within a state, the bedroom within a state used to have a certain autonomy. However, excited by the advent of the nanny state political philosophy, a member of Parliament and former parliamentary secretary is proposing that the state relieves itself of its external bedroom crust by introducing the state within the bedroom. I find this idea extraordinarily revolutionary from a political science point of view. One must tolerate the fact that most original ideas attract some hostility due to their aspect of experimentation but one must allow the profoundly convinced MP the opportunity to prove that the state within the bedroom is to the benefit of the bedroom.

Once I heard a story about a person, of a certain education, mind you, who regularly pushed his spouse off the bed as a joke. No doubt, this unkind fun made him keep his intelligence sharp. Another person claimed to have married his tall, dark, straight wife when he was drunk and, thus, had the right to indulge in all sorts of behaviour to make up for this mistake beyond his control. When he lay in bed and his wife approached, he called out "timber!", which was not very complimentary and obviously a mental torture. A lady whose husband snored imposed a nose operation on him but did not carry it out herself, although she was quite capable of performing it artistically. The surgery was successful but the poor man ended up unable to smell a rat.

The Family Court and gossipy blogs are full of these stories, which attracted the attention of an MP who was reported as having declared that "the government has the right to interfere in the bedroom." This opinion was carried in big titles in some papers. Out of genuine rationality, a journalist later modified this title to something less exciting and quite boring.

However, once the opinion had made public waves, people started trying to find out in what way the government intended to participate in the activities of couples' and threesome's bedrooms.

The bedroom watch

Following the introduction and success of the neighbourhood watch, some elements thereof were extracted for implementation in yet another watch: the bedroom watch. This retained the neighbours as protagonists as they were expected to participate in the adoption of the bedroom law and other regulations as set up by a Christian fundamentalist version of the Taliban doctrine.

Neighbours will be expected to prick up their ears at their windows and try to find out if anyone is being pushed out of bed, called "timber" or snoring above a certain level of decibels. They will then report to a special office, which will take steps from the lightest to the gravest. The latter is the introduction of a government official sharing the bed of the spouses and trying to identify any irregular behaviour. Neighbours reporting these events may do so by SMS but a better system has to be found as the SMS-reporting for smoke emissions from vehicles did not work well.

All in all, the least marital harmony will be subject to entertainment tax. Nothing is free in life.

The shower watch

If the bedroom watch is successful, the MP will be invited to set in motion another useful watch: the shower watch. The main purpose for this will be to find out if some couples are having a shower together and thus cheating on the water bill.

Morality officers

All the above could lead to twinning with a Saudi Arabian town with mayors exchanging protocol. The Financial Times of May 25 reports a number of interesting measures making sure that the state participates actively in the intimate life of its citizens. The morality enforcement squads, or mutawa, herd men to mosques while forcing shops to close during prayer time. They also raid shops to stop women and men from mingling. The official name of the mutawa is "Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice". This led to the new University of Riyadh, the Princess Nora University, to be restricted to women only. Occasionally, a man will be allowed in the anthropology lab for a careful examination of this strange species.

FT reports that Saudi Arabia is ruled through consensus between the royal family and the religious establishment. Before crying out in horror, maybe we can realise that many Maltese see absolutely no harm in this kind of arrangement.

Song birds

Stricter bird protection regulations have brought about an increased presence of song birds in Malta. In some cases, bird couples can be observed singing together.

Difficult Maltese people have not yet understood that the state intervention in Maltese bedrooms and the mutawa are basically administrative measures to increase the harmony of the song birds in the bedrooms.