Our colonial masters used to describe Malta as the island of “Yells, Bells and Smells” (or so David Niven would have us believe while mooning the balloon, anyway) and while the bells have subsided, to be replaced by petards in religious observance, yells and smells still plague us.

To be fair, yells have also diminished a bit, though perhaps this is a mere perception, caused by the fact that windows are kept closed more than they used to be in the past, what with air-conditioning and other blights on the environment, so we don’t get to hear the “friendly discussions between neighbours” or between drivers who have come headlight to headlight and think its unmanly to engage reverse.

There are also no hawkers shouting their wares in the streets, though I’d rather we had that on Wednesdays in the Three Villages area than the air-horn some miscreant thinks is an appropriate means of telling the populace she’s around to flog them something at the crack of dawn. Naturally, in our area, the only input we ever see from any of the supposedly-concerned local councils is to restrict parking even more and fine residents for parking anywhere near their homes, so there’s no real hope anyone is going to do anything about this.

But smells, now, there’s another thing. We get plenty of those, for our sins. Walking through any street in Valletta in high summer will reward you with a whiff of canine detritus that is pungent and singularly unappealing. You also tend to get numerous whiffs of the great unwashed economising on deodorant, having previously eschewed the temptation to take a shower, an experience exacerbated in my case by having given up smoking cigars except in the weekend, resulting in my olfactory senses being enhanced.

In the countryside, such as is left to us by the conservationist hunters and trappers, smells abound, though here they are of nature doing her thing and therefore unexceptionable, really. Smells emanating from the exhausts of trucks and buses, and from the backs of restaurants, and from drains also enhance the urban landscape, for your enjoyment.

Smells are not the only pollutant, of course: as I write, a neighbour is jack-hammering away at the plot of land where he’s building, though it’s a relatively civilised time of day, so there’s not much I can – or will – moan about. As opposed to a mate, who has the ineffable pleasure, where he lives in Sliema, of having a major development being erected across the road and contractors who have apparently decided that they are the lords and masters of all they survey, so the neighbours can go and get stuffed.

MEPA, apparently, has been contacted but hasn’t the resources to do anything: if anyone wants to send me an email, I’ll pass on the details and the authorities can extract their finger from where it’s been posteriorly buried and do something.

But getting back to the smells and (virtual) yells, on Friday a smell, generally described as one of gas, spread around Malta, pretty much around the mid-to-North area. Gozo and the South seem to have not been affected, which I can confirm insofar as concerns Gozo.

This being the age of immediate self-gratification, the (virtual) yelling started almost immediately. In the good old days, we’d have had a really heavy bout of “Maltese gemgem” (for the aliens amongst my readers, “gemgem” is an onomatopoeic rendering of the almost sub-audible sound of the Maltese grumbling about things at the cafés and grocers and on their doorsteps) but now, anyone with access to a keyboard can blast his or her whine across the ‘Net, loud enough for all to read.

No sooner had the electronic news portals mentioned the fact that there was a smell around and people were wondering what it was that everyone and his or her sister and brother started shooting off comments about how shameful it was that the Government was leaving everyone in the dark (not literally, for a change)

Not to be outdone, of course, the jolly old Labour Party jumped onto the bandwagon with alacrity, adding its own voice to the chorus of whining and whinging that was playing itself out across the land – to go with the smell, we had the yells.

All we needed was the bells to conjure up the ghost of Niven past.