• Lists given to children with regard to the purchase of school supplies once again include packets of alcohol-based hand wipes. There are some teachers who, it appears, prefer children to sit down at their desks and clean their hands with chemicals before eating their lunch rather than using soap and water.

Homely

• The Nationalist Party is sending e-mails to people on a list, informing them that ‘their’ children may be eligible to ask the Prime Minister ‘anything they want’. This is yet another public relations exercise gone sour. Some of the recipients have been trying for years to conceive children!

Hasty

• On September 9, thousands of cyclists, some of them children, thronged the streets for the traditional pilgrimage on the occasion of the feast of Our Lady of Graces, celebrated in Żabbar. In some instances, adults and children alike were wending in and out of traffic. This was a very dangerous thing to do. Should there not have been better traffic arrangements?

Harassment

• There has been another spate of telephone calls in English from people with a terrible accent. They ask for people by name and inform them that they are damaging Microsoft’s operating system because they are downloading malware. When the person called asks them to clarify something or even passes an inane comment they repeat their spiel, apparently because they do not even understand English in the first place.

Hilarious

• Another scam is a very soberly worded e-mail that a person’s PayPal account will be closed soon, owing to it not having been utilised for a set period of time. The only give-away that this is a phishing scam is the typo that asks recipient to confirm their “informations”. Moreover, the message is being received by people who do not even subscribe to PayPal.

Help

• A new campaign is under way to check all people who are 60 to 64 years old for colorectal cancer. One wonders whether provisions have been made to screen those who have had parents, siblings or children who have died of this condition within recent years but do not fall within this age band.

History

• Since people outside this age band also fall prey to the condition, it would be useful to encourage junior doctors to learn better how to recognise its symptoms. Since some of these also obtain in other conditions, special attention must be paid when asking about a patient’s medical history.

Hosted

• It would be interesting to know how many women who were offered a free mammogram refused the test and whether they indicated specific reasons for doing so. It is also pertinent to ask whether the rate of breast cancer deaths has decreased, increased or remained stable since the tests started.

Handy

• The free bags given out by certain local councils for Recycle Tuesdays are getting progressively flimsier and smaller. This is a false economy because some households are using two at a time.

Headway

• The habit of installing rubber sleeping policemen in streets that have a heavy traffic flow leaves a lot to be desired. The friction and the vibrations cause bits of the rubber to tear off and car wheels take care of the rest. As a result, the bolts used to attach the speed bumps to the road remain proud and damage vehicles that pass over them.

Hiked

• The public toilets in Duke of Edinburgh Street, Ħamrun have recently been refurbished. With Ħamrun being a locality that people go to for shopping and other errands, it is a pity that these toilets are kept closed during the mornings. Not everyone is in a position to use toilets in eateries because this usually entails purchasing something at higher prices than at a take-away.

High

• Several large clumps of bushes already blemish the recently restored bastions and ramparts below the House of Four Winds, overlooking Marsamxett. Is it possible that nothing can be done to stop this recurring, again and again? Remedial action should be taken immediately.

Hale

• An advertisement by Benna plastered on the back of a public bus shows a cat declaring that it drinks three glasses of milk a day, with the implication that we ought to do likewise. However, all animal lovers will confirm that if a cat had to drink that much milk daily, it would die within a short period of time.

Hearth

• Is it possible to check the provenance of logs of wood sold for fireplaces before the cold season begins? It is annoying to see trees being pruned drastically and haphazardly immediately before this happens.

Hazy

• Passers-by, tourists, shop owners and residents would appreciate a new selection of music for the fountains at St George’s Square, Valletta. The amount of eye-rolling and fast escapes from the area whenever the first strains of the current tunes are heard attests to this.

Hosing

• There is a constant terrible smell of horse and human urine at the side of the boundary wall of the Little Sisters of the Poor at Ħamrun. It is not simply a matter of hosing the area down because the heavy vehicles that are sometimes parked there would prevent the water from flowing down to the nearest drain and also the remaining liquid dries off in the sun.

Hacked

• A wide part of the wall in the street where there is the MSSP oratory in Birkirkara crumbled down during the September 3 storm. To date, it has not been fixed. Soil will continue to flow out of the open space every time it rains. Apart from this, the rubble is posing a danger to passing vehicles.