Two eyewitnesses saw a man being abducted about a fortnight ago. They saw him being aggressively forced into a van, in broad daylight, while waiting outside his garage in Rabat. Neither did anything.

One of the eyewitnesses saw the white van opposite her house and heard men yelling “Carlos! Get out!” She saw blood on (Carlos) Schembri’s face but thought that “the men were friends of his who were taking him to a health centre”. She went back inside. “It was none of my business,” she told the court, she had simply looked outside “out of curiosity”.

Another neighbour on that road also heard “shouting… like groaning,” and saw two or three people but he thought they were just “fooling around”.

Only a few weeks ago, in another criminal case, the court also heard how a man was walking along Sliema promenade and possibly witnessed the rape of Paulina Dembska, the 29-year-old Polish student. He initially thought he was watching someone do push-ups; then saw a pair of women’s legs underneath and assumed it was a couple having sex. But he was “listening to the rosary on the radio,” he told the court, and “couldn’t hear very well”.

I won’t judge the witnesses’ lack of action; there are reams and reams of psychological studies on the bystander effect. Sometimes, for a multitude of complex reasons, we just do nothing when deep down we clock in that someone is in danger. There’s even a long-standing American television series, aptly called, What would you do?, which stages illegal activity in public settings and then records the reactions of passing strangers with hidden cameras.

But each time that something like this is reported in our media, it feels like a punch in the gut. I very much fear that in the case of a small island like ours, it’s less the bystander effect and more the ‘ma rridx inkwiet’ effect. I have lost count of the number of women I have met who were violently abused but got no help from neighbouring witnesses. The same goes for all the rampant corruption going on in the top tiers of government – witnesses readily adopt the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil stance.

The law of omertà – something that even the Venice Commission highlighted in the rule of law report on Malta – was always prevalent in Malta, possibly because of our colonialist past and our claustrophobic size. We perceive silence as the best form of protection and survival. It is not: the more we speak up, the safer and fairer our neighbourhood and our community will be.

We perceive silence as the best form of protection and survival- Kristina Chetcuti

All it takes is one phone call to 112 – and many a time, that can be much more helpful than sheer curiosity or the Rosary.

Election day

Air Malta seems to be quite busy with flights from Brussels on the long weekend of March 19. Now, this is a very strange occurrence, seeing as the airline is on its last legs and seeing as for the last year or so it has gone from almost two flights a day to barely two flights a week.

It seems that someone is really eager for all the Brussels expats to come down that weekend. Could it be that that’s the E-day? An election on March 19 would be quite fitting, wouldn’t it? The pope would be popping down two weeks later to crown the win by blessing the nation.

I was quite amused last week by the bride-to-be who wrote an open letter to the prime minister asking him to please get on with announcing the date because she was getting married on June 5 and if the election is held the day before she doesn’t quite fancy having her guests glued to TVM waiting for the results.

And she’s right really; we can’t afford the wait. The economy is in its worst shape ever, and the last thing we need is for the country to come to a protracted campaign standstill, because then not even the pope’s prayers will be able to revive it.

Valentines’ Day

We have a turntable now at home. This means we joined the vinyl-revival band, which, according to the teenagers at home, makes us, the boomers of the house, “cool”.

My parents used to have one back in the day, in a corner of the house, and I seem to remember vaguely my father putting on a Carlos Santana record and there always being some problem or other with the needle until finally the music would drift out from speakers in the living room. (When I was about six or seven, impressed by demonic-themed catechism lessons, I used to read the record title as Carlos ‘Satana’ and it used to scare the hell out of me).

That turntable has long gone, but only now, in my 40s, have I come to realise that the life of the ’70s should not have been easily discarded. Sound was back then all about the experience and the theatre of it all. We lost all that in the furore of the digital world, where we tend to press the ‘skip’ button every 30 seconds.

A turntable makes you have a think about what kind of music you feel like before you choose a record, because once you put it on, you have to listen to it all and savour the lingering mood. When it finishes, then, there’s a ritual: you wipe the record, you put it back in its sleeve, and you choose another one.

And there’s nothing more delightful than listening to vinyl with your favourite person in the world.