As I have had occasion to remark - or think I have, anyway, it's 38C out there and I'm not up to doing anything other than lying here tapping lightly - this is a country of 400,000-odd architects, planners, judges, football coaches and candle-stick makers. To say nothing of 400,000-odd columnists, commentators, keepers of law and order and, generally speaking, experts about everything and that all the time.

Just to take an illustration, look at the feature carried in the paper (and virtual) edition of this paper, and consider the comments made wherever they could be, about the parking plans for Sliema, which aim at giving residents greater rights than aliens.

I'm not up to speed about the details, but the bottom-line, apparently, is that you can spend about a couple of hours parked on the street in Sliema but then have to hop it and leave space for residents.

This scheme has raised the hackles of quite a few people, not least of whom are the various ladies who coffee (their diets don't allow them lunch, of course) and who shop, generally using their husbands' hard-earned dosh to carry out that particular biological function.

Before the massed ranks of women bear down on me to remind me that women work and earn their own money, yes, I know that, but the ones who whine and whinge and spend their time in Sliema shopping, gossiping and sipping cappuccinos (with skimmed milk, of course) before swanning off for a tennis lesson, are not the ones who are prone to do much of that.

Said ladies have thrown their hands up in horror that they won't be able to park their BMWs on the street in Sliema anymore when they descend on the place to shop.

Their combined IQ of, what, 10?, prevents them realising, it seems, that you haven't actually been able to park on the street in Sliema for many, many years now and they are having this little whine, one has to assume, because one of the people they perceive as knowing things (Kevin Decesare of the Hotels and Restaurants lobby) has said they should and they lack the critical faculties to notice that they're talking out of their tennis frocks.

Moving on from ladies who whinge to activists who are prone to over-inflate, we come neatly to the FAA, which has pronounced itself on the Piano Project by decreeing that a certain lack of concern for the people's wishes is being discerned.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the extent to which the wishes of the Great Unwashed need to be taken into account other than every five years or so (why bother having a Government if you're going to play to the gallery all the time?) precisely how, one asks, did the FAA come to the conclusion, as it appears to have done, that the people never asked for Parliament to be sited in Valletta.

To an extent, this is true, of course, the people never did actually petition the Government to have Parliament housed in Valletta - to be accurate, the people never actually asked the Government to have Parliament housed anywhere in particular, the conclusion drawn by the FAA is faithful to a narrowly-defined version of the truth.

But, if I might be permitted to ask, in the full knowledge that I'm going to get howled down by those who know better and have megaphones to hand to be able to prove it, how in the name of all that's beautiful does the FAA know what anyone, apart from the people who are active within it (and even then, I doubt they have a clear mind) wants?

Have they conducted scientific surveys? Please, don't waste your time even trying to answer that one: they didn't even wait for the scientific evidence on the St John's Project, why the heck would they bother with trying to establish the facts?

No, they haven't conducted any sort of precise evaluation of what the public thinks, if the public thinks at all. What they have done is take a look at the comments sections of the papers and the columns of those who spout the line that Culture (and that's culture with a capital "c" of course) has to be paid for by you and me for them to enjoy at reasonable (read cheap) prices and come to the perfectly ridiculous conclusion that this is the voice of the people.

And it is on these lines that policy is made in the media age, folks.