• Is there any legal limit to how high, and how heavily, skips outside houses that are being refurbished, may be filled? It is scary to see them sway when being elevated for removal; the vehicles themselves sometimes shift on their wheels. Cars are often parked in the area.

Molehills

• Triq San Ġorġ, in Ħamrun, is used by hundreds of vehicles daily, and even more on Sundays, since it is a short-cut link to High Street. This could be part of the reason why it is in such a bad condition – and why it needs to be resurfaced as soon as possible.

Miniature

• Why is it that children are allowed to exercise tiny ponies in the streets of residential areas? Sometimes, the animals are walked and, sometimes, they are attached to a small cart which one of the children rides. Often, alas, one of the children flicks a tiny whip at the animals’ flanks. This could result in the animal causing an accident.

Marks

• No fewer than 2,100 tonnes of glass are being exported to Portugal for recycling. It would be interesting to know whether any glass has been used locally by glass-makers or other industries such as road building.

Messy

• It is now accepted that dog owners are to carry a plastic bag with which to pick up their pets’ faeces. However, it may be noted that often, the mess is not totally removable and leaves a stain, or even some material, on the ground. This attracts mosquitoes, anyway.

Masonry

• Is it not illegal to cut stones to measure outside residential areas? This exercise creates both noise and fine white dust that enters buildings nearby if windows or doors are left open. Do local councils give these projects the go-ahead?

Moving

• It is becoming fashionable to hold parties on boats for several reasons. The two most important ones appear to be that there are the added bonuses of it being easier to jump into the sea than it would be from a venue on land and that unannounced visits by policemen rarely happen.

Music

• A wonderful initiative has been taken by the Immaculate Conception Band Club of Ħamrun. As part of their feast celebrations, they are offering free music lessons to those interested in spending their time in a constructive manner.

Maybe

• After the Buġibba Water Park was inaugurated, there were vague promises that another one would be constructed in the general area of “the South”. Nothing more was heard about this promise.

Minted

• Perhaps it is time for Maltapost plc to issue a new set of stamps – one depicting all the prime ministers that Malta has had since Independence. This would put paid to a lot of silly comments that have been doing the rounds.

Murky

• Whatever happened to the polluter pays principle? After debris and sludge from the dredging of the area around a slipway in Qawra was dumped once again willy-nilly into a bathers’ area, we heard conflicting reports from the planning authority and the local council of St Paul’s Bay. If the action was illegal, and has been committed before, one expects retroactive fines to be issued.

Movements

• Several bays now have strings of buoys delineating areas where swimmers may swim safely. Alas, the discharge from sea craft engines does not take kindly to being bound by regulations and manages to seep into bathing areas too. Perhaps this happens because engine speeds are not cut far enough from the shore to make a difference.

Marks

• Around this time of the year parents of school-age children, especially those in schools where uniforms have changes, begin to worry about the expense and weighing whether having to wash a uniform every day is better than getting an extra set. Surely it is evident that regular shirts and polo vests, with a school logo embroidered onto them, would suffice.

Management

• The press occasionally regales us with hideous tales of sick and underfed animals being kept in bad conditions and much ado is made about how they have been freed from their imprisonment. Yet there are other dogs, kept singly or in smaller groups, living miserably on farms and in auto-mechanics’ yards, with no shelter, a container of water that becomes hot by mid-morning, and unsavoury-looking scraps of food.

Muddle

• Many people who shop in the general area of the Birkirkara bus terminus find it preferable to park their cars there rather than going around the streets in search of a free place. Given that this zone is a junction of several streets, with traffic coming from all directions, it is a very dangerous situation; it is indeed a wonder that not more accidents happen.

More

• Several ideas are being bandied about to the effect that phone booths or items of furniture would be placed in public places and filled with books for free borrowing. However, this idea has been shot down because when it was tried in the past the books were stolen. Since no registration is necessary for this, how about having a few shelves installed in local councils for people to deposit and borrow books on a casual basis? This would discourage theft for sure.

Markers

• We have heard several times of late that the court “has its hands tied” when it comes to meting out sentences for several crimes. There is an obvious solution to this – the enactment of new legislation that would increase fines and/or prison sentences and do away with most suspended sentences, and also introduce community service where the wages that would be earned by the criminal would go to his victim by way of compensation.