I was not shocked by the number of tourists I recently heard complaining about the bus service.

Mellieħa is a European Destination of Excellence and the local council does a good job with the beach and events in the village but for the average tourist getting to Għadira is a nightmare. They are either crammed onto buses packed to the point of danger or if you stay in a hotel in the village and would like to walk to the beach you have to negotiate ridiculously narrow footpaths that are hardly wide enough for a pushchair where the Ville Michel project boundary has taken half of the pavement away.

As a result, pedestrians have to use the road, which, in itself, is a hazard given some of the suicidal driving I see on a daily basis.

If you are walking down on a recycle day you need to be an Olympic hurdler to get over the mounds of recycle bags that litter the street until mid-afternoon.

I would recommend the Qawra, Buġibba and Mellieħa councils to have a word with their opposites in Blackpool, England’s Buġibba, but on a bigger scale. They clean the streets as soon as the last nightclub shuts and collect refuse at dawn hours so when tourists pour out to the beach the place is clean and tidy. Here, cleaning staff would be working in the cool morning temperatures and there is little traffic to hold up refuse vehicles.

It wouldn’t take an IT genius to programme the bus destination signage to say “Sorry: full up. Next bus in XX mins”.

With the troubles in Europe and Turkey, a lot of people are eyeing Malta as a holiday resort, so, come on, Malta Tourism Authority make them want to return not vow never to get a bus again as long as they live...