Walking down the hill at Santa Liberata Street and up St Dwardu Road past De la Salle and St Edward College, one sees two adjacent trenches/troughs on the left side of the road.

One narrow one, dug over three months ago, carries communications cables in white plastic pipes, while the larger, wider, deeper, more recent one, is destined to carry Enemalta's power cables, all in aid of SmartCity, I presume. Different digging schedules means different contractors and different tenders and more and wider road damage, all at a higher expense.

This morning I saw part of the wall separating the trenches caving in, towards the new trench, uncovering the "white communication pipes" in the oldest trench dug over three months ago. One hopes that the jaws of the recent trencher machine did not damage the already laid communication cables. They are so close!

While I appreciate that communication and power cables have to be installed, could the contractors finish the road surface as they do in Switzerland where the packing factor is studied carefully beforehand and asphalt joints are fully watertight and hardly visible and so the new trench surface does not go lower than the adjacent old surfaces due to traffic weight?

Or are we to look at two unasphalted eyesores consisting of two adjacent parallel rubbled indented lines, artistically waving their way along the side of these roads for the rest of our life?

I thought that overhead cables were out, to rid us of overhead eyesores; it did not mean that eyesores were to be exchanged to a lower road surface level! Ah, the importance of exactness, or lack of it, in encoded messages in our written laws benefits the contractors and criminals and not the ordinary and perhaps simple public!

With all this work going on in the old mentioned roads, I suspect and smell a big, big rat in that the new planned road from Bieb Is-Sultan at Żabbar, cutting directly across to the Capuchins' monastery/church closer to SmartCity, is not to be deployed and so the narrow Santa Liberata Street will have to cope with the heavier, more polluted traffic to SmartCity.

If this planned road was done before the trenching just mentioned, the filling of trenches, cables, damage to roads, pollution levels and the expenses, would have been lowered because the new road would have been much shorter and away from residential areas to carry the expected higher traffic.

So thank you all planners for your wonderful systematically applied illogical logic.

May I quote myself when, after hearing so much recent profound and profuse thanks giving in The Times to doctors, dentists, nurses at Mater Dei Hospital but not to engineers who built and equipped this recently-built wonderful hospital, I came up with "pain to some is praise and profit to others" in many, many, many ways in Malta.

Sometimes I wonder where religious belief comes in this unusual distribution of pain to all residents in Malta but in business and politics and law and religion one normally turns a blind eye towards the nature of such pain distribution by uttering one single Maltese word: Paċenzja (patience)!