In Birkirkara’s government housing estate about six years ago, this macho truck driver affixed a two-storey-high trestle-like primitive scaffolding to the side of an apartment block and draped it over with canvas material.

It served as a makeshift garage for his articulated lorry cab and speed boat.

A flagrant illegality for all to see. Despite countless phone calls to Birkirkara police station and letters to two former police commissioners, the structure, the cab and the speed boat didn’t budge an inch.

Then an e-mail was sent to the new Police Commissioner, Michael Cassar, towards New Year’s Eve. Less than a week later, a gang of workmen turned up.

The structure was taken down and the draping, the speed boat and the articulated lorry cab did a vanishing act.

To tell the truth, I had thought the new commissioner wouldn’t be able to find the time to look at my e-mail, considering the shambles he had found the Police Corps in, especially after two years of macho minister Manuel Mallia’s mayhem.

With the corps’ dignity in tatters, he would be too busy pickingup and trying to put back together again, the pieces.

Of course, I could not have been more wrong.

Now I think I know why Cassar had decided to politely decline Mallia’s offer to step in after former police commissioner Peter Paul Zammit took flight, only for Cassar to take up that very same offer after Mallia, like the lorry cab, did a vanishing act.

I too must make an offer to Cassar: my most humble apologies for having entertained the thought that the e-mail of mine would be an annoying distraction to him, that it would be meted the same treatment as those that had been sent to those before him.

If this is a mere foretaste of his tenure, then... right on!

Thanks, Mr Top Cop.