The police took a phone call last Sunday from at least one irate Gżira parishioner after deafening firework 'bombs' blasted residents from their slumber.
From their bedrooms there was no way of telling whether the explosives being let off were larger or smaller than the regulation 10 centimetres set down by a legal notice passed last March. All they knew was that the rare peace of a Sunday morning had been shattered beyond what the new fireworks law allows on paper.
Pyrotechnic powders apart, mixing the two manias of football and fireworks produces a surefire cocktail that will bend any rule in the book.
Hit again by the World Cup final, after predictable low attendance at their evening festa every four years, Gżira decided to do it differently this season.
Any noise nuisance from the vuvuzelas pales in comparison with the Saturday night feast, transposed in its entirety last week to blast a hole into Sunday morning. What would have been the evening barrage was simply shunted over to the morning hours in a nonsensical "Yes, but..." interpretation of the law.
An 8 a.m. firing prolonged beyond the 10-minute legal limit was followed by a second volley of loud bangs at 9.30 a.m., which certainly appeared to be in breach of the allowed discharge times for that time of day.
Because we all live on top of each other, with World Cup beer venues tucked under village feasts, regulations have taken on the quality of shifting sands.
"Everything is according to the regulations," said the voice coming down the phone from the police station. Could it be the regulations are not restrictive enough or there is negligence in the line of duty to enforce? Or is it the law itself which goes gooey like asphalt in the heat?
Noise tolerance of the long-suffering public would be higher on a summer Saturday evening than at 8 a.m. the next morning. This juggling with decibels and circadian rhythms is running circles around the law.
In terms of noise disturbance, the legal notice annoyingly makes no distinction between a feast which reaches its apex in the evening and one which is traditionally celebrated in the morning.
The law for control of fireworks and other explosives has been amended over and again in the last decade. It can make amusing reading if you are in the right frame of mind and not being besieged by a battery of explosions.
Terminology and legalese is bound to raise the odd giggle, even this falls well short of soothing our decibel-wracked nerves. In the legal notice the basic ground firework, a Catherine wheel (miġnuna) is scrupulously referred to in its plural form as mġienen (crazy ones).
Under a suitably sober heading for the appropriate times to let off fireworks, someone has carefully seen to it that the law is applied to 'Moving the statute from the niche'. Legal experts drafting legislation may be forgiven for being more handy with the word 'statute' and less with the word 'statue'.
The Minister for Justice has long appointed an explosives committee, although the links to it on the ministry website do not seem to be functioning as they should. An initial search indicates little more than an official 'pyrotechnics committee', along with other dead links.
An obviously different sort of pyrotechnic committee in Żejtun has been in the habit of lapping up credit 'for the wonderful display that concluded the night', adding to the colourful confusion.
Incidentally, only 10 out of 24 boards and committees on the Justice Ministry's website have an immediate and functioning link that lists members by name.
Of these it is worth noting that there are a total of 17 people on the street-naming committees. In contrast, for the Health and Safety Monitoring Board covering the whole of Malta, there are only four people. Five committees appear to be either lost in action or gone away without leave.
Blessed are those obsessed with getting through the back door. Information pops up by targeted search once we average citizens know where to look for it.
An update has indeed been made and the respective committee does exist, if rather thinly. It is made up loosely of the Commander of the Armed Forces as chairman, and the Commissioner of Police and Director General of Works or their representatives, without mentioning whether these busy men are represented or not.
A fireworks inspectorate has been in place since 2008, when it started carrying out inspections on fireworks factories, and later supposedly at launch sites. Here the law loosely provides that an inspection may be made before, during or after the event, which binds no one to necessarily be present when firing is actually taking place.
The brief is mainly improved enforcement of legislation and promoting good practice by anyone involved in the storage and manufacture of fireworks. Suitably qualified public officers must declare any conflict of interest regarding any fireworks factory they may be asked to inspect.
Required persons of a suitable scientific and professional background are not exactly queuing at the barrier for the post. The government was to have issued another call to the private sector. The official view is that an inspectorate made up both of professionals and experienced enthusiasts would be best-suited for the job.
The prime focus of the unit still leans toward stopping enthusiasts blowing themselves up at the production site, 'so that fireworks will continue to be enjoyed without further loss of life'.
The festa hell of ordinary mortals, children, the sick and elderly - who seem inferior to fireworks enthusiasts - goes on as summer heats up.