It was another fine day at the Valletta police station. The sun was shining, the pigeons were moulting, and despite the outrageous recent indulgence in musical concerts, outdoor festivities and other such examples of State-sponsored anarchy, the entire country appeared to have finally reverted to its usual, lazy routine.

PC Joey was sitting in the reception area, both feet up on the desk as he sank his teeth into the giant hobza which he had got some underling to buy for him from the kiosk round the corner. Life, he found himself thinking, was not such a bad thing after all.
He had every reason to feel good about himself, too. After all, he and his colleagues in the Force had only just survived their most serious threat in several years, after the government foolishly gave in to public pressure and issued a permit for an MTV concert on the Fosos last Thursday.
An MTV concert? On the Fosos? What on earth were they thinking? Don’t they know that when people gather together in groups of more than 10, it is automatically an act of sedition against the State? And to make matters worse, these people were dancing. That’s right: not sitting still and doing what they’re told – which is, of course, the sole reason for people’s existence in the first place – but actually shaking their booties to the outlandish, Satanic rhythms of bands with names like “Moron 5”. That must be against the law, surely…
But despite rumours that grave acts of spontaneity were erupting all over the city as a result (e.g. the entire Police Force was still on high alert after reports that someone had hummed a Zucchero tune on Republic Street), the event came and went without so much as a minor scuffle.
Still, Joey couldn’t help but feel that it was highly unreasonable of the government to put his life at such manifest risk. Just as it was a shame that his beloved country should be permitted to descend into such decadence and impropriety to begin with.

Like many of his colleagues in the Force, PC Joey privately dreamed of a glorious forgotten past: a time when strict curfews were enforced from dusk till dawn; when men were men, and women were childbearing cooks; when playing loud music after 11pm was an offence punishable by public stoning; and when a citizen could be imprisoned for so much as thinking that he or she was anything other than a tiny cog in an intricate and well-oiled machine. Naturally, he knew it was just a private fantasy (although he would have been surprised to discover how widely the same fantasy was shared – not just by the Home Affairs Minister and those nutcases in Azzjoni Nazzjonali, but also the entire Opposition party and some 85 per cent of the population)… but this didn’t stop him from marvelling at this beautiful vision of natural order and universal harmony, whereby people simply did what they were told without any fuss, and never once stepped out of the rigid lines imposed upon them for their own benefit by the glorious Powers That Be.
Even as the thought occurred to him, his gaze fell on a headline in the newspaper on the desk in front of him: “Valletta Arts Festival starts today”.
PC Joey scowled. Just as things were going so smoothly, too. Honestly: doesn’t the government know that “art” is just another word for “trouble”? We all know how it goes: a painting here, a video installation there… and before you know it, it will be vandalism, fornication and pornography all round, not to mention gay marriages, abortion and the legalisation of hard drugs.
Joey took another giant bite out of his hobza and found himself reminiscing about his own moment of glory at the national stadium at Ta’ Qali some two years earlier. He couldn’t remember the precise date (even though it was inscribed on the medal at home, and which he forced his wife to polish each week alongside all the family brass)… but it was soon after the death of – God bless him – Pope John Paul II: that holy man, whose goodness shone like a beacon in this dark world, and whose memory still served as an inspiration to millions of men like Joey throughout the world, to tirelessly suppress all forms of spontaneity and free-spiritedness wheresoever they raise their ugly heads.

But nothing quite prepared Joey for the shock that was in store for him at the stadium that afternoon, when a football supporter did the unthinkable and actually smuggled a placard past the tight security at the gate.
A placard! Looking back on the incident, Joey couldn’t tell which had shocked him more: the fact that the man actually attempted to display a written message in public without a licence – a crime which must surely rank up there with genocide, atheism and paedophilia – or the fact that the message in question dared criticise the Malta Football Association… that holy and untouchable institution, second only to the Pope in the Divine Infallibility stakes.
Either way, the man had clearly overstepped all levels of decency. So, together with 11 of his colleagues – and only after having radioed for reinforcements and a back-up helicopter – PC Joey bravely confiscated the offending placard, and gave its owner a very public telling off to boot.
Naturally, he had been awarded the “Midalja Gieh il-Jamahariya” as a result.

Today, however, things were quiet. So quiet, that not even a single meddlesome tourist had burst into the station claiming to have been defrauded by a taxi-driver. It is perhaps for this reason that PC Joey was so profoundly shocked when the telephone (that unreasonable appliance, installed against the Force’s better judgment several decades earlier, and regretted ever since) actually rang.
Shock turned to horror when the voice on the other end informed him that the unthinkable had indeed happened: that, just as he had privately foreboded, there was a terrifying price to pay for the country’s lowering of its moral guard.

CLOWNS! There were clowns, wandering freely around the streets of the capital city! Wearing make-up and red noses! Flapping about in their ridiculously large shoes, playing musical instruments in public (yes, even in front of children – can you imagine?), brandishing water-pistols and playing tricks on the general public, for all the world as though… as though… as though clowning around was not explicitly prohibited by our Glorious Constitution, alongside drug-taking, placard-carrying and premarital sex. Can you believe it? Anyone would think that people were actually free to have a bit of harmless fun, without being named, shamed, spat upon and reviled. How on earth could this appalling heresy have come to pass? And what’s it going to be next? Circus elephants? Trapeze artists? Moral relativists? At the rate we’re going, very soon we will no longer be able to proudly state that we live in a Glorious Police State, in which every step, every breath and every thought was meticulously monitored and controlled for our own benefit and safety.

Even as the enormity of the implications sank into PC Joey’s pea-sized brain, the voice on the other end of the phone supplied a second, earth-shattering revelation to add to the news that Valletta had been invaded by the Circus from Hell.
These clowns, quite apart from being… well, clowns… were also – wait for it – foreigners! And not your ordinary foreigners, either. Nothing like those nice Italians or Germans, who come and spend all their money on suntan lotion and souvenirs, then promptly buzz off back home. Oh, no. These were… horror of horrors… Brazilian! From the Amazon rainforest! They even speak an alien language that sounds like something straight out of The Exorcist! And who knows? Under all that make-up, they could even be… BLACK!!
PC Joey nearly fell of his chair at the thought. But even as panic mounted, he retained enough composure to remember what the manual says about handling tricky or dangerous situations over the phone. So he repeated the time-honoured formula, used by all policemen in all countries whenever they are presented with an unreasonably demanding request:

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about it at the moment. I’m here on my own, you know…”