Once again, the authorities have allowed the destructive forces of pyrotechnics to play havoc with an environment of leisure and well-being. The Malta Golf Club is a veritable oasis surrounded by harmless industrial estates and arterial roads. It is a place where senior citizens spend their miserly pensions in costly fees to enjoy a morning or afternoon session in healthy surroundings.

It is a place where professional coaches train youngsters of all ages so that, one day, they will do honour to Malta in international competitions. It is a place that welcomes a queue of keen visitors and foreign golfers who come by taxi from their hotels. Financially and economically, they reinforce the survival of the club that pays exorbitant annual fees to the government.

It is a place where gregarious families addicted to social intercourse meet and participate in entertainment and in cultural activities that selfless committee members organise during weekends.

It employs a cohort of workers that ensure the magnificent beauty of evergreen turf, endemic trees, flora and fauna and the freedom to roam unperturbed except by a warm sun and the occasional thunderstorm.

It is a place where visitors and residents of different nationalities integrate so well that they offset all colonial remnants of racialism. To think that people who should know better care little if they destroy the reputation of this unique paradise. To think that the pleasures of pyrotechnic enthusiasts could be the cause of incendiary accidents and could spell the untimely death of unwary golfers playing rounds of golf.

It is no wonder then that those who set off a mixture of petards, rockets and other "time bombs" from the very grounds of the Marsa Golf Club hide behind a bastion of truck tires piled 10 feet high and a solid iron skip to save their skin. Whoever originated the idea of using the club as a launching pad should be named and shamed.