For the past few days I have been stuck at home nursing the infamous Maltese Flu. I got it all: the pain, the shivers, the nights in bed, hot and furious, for all the wrong reasons.

I usually hang on for dear life avoiding doctors, medicines and the whole shebang. I wanted to figure out if it were just a small mediocre flu or the bastard Maltese one which has been packing our hospitals, both private and public, to the point where our brilliantly-planned National Health Service ended up without stretchers as they were all being used as beds. In corridors.

This time though, and after another night of mad hallucinations (not, of course Night Nurse-induced) including being presented with my 14-year old cat on a plate, along with some fish, to eat (in moments like this I miss Renald, Capital Radio and Il-Holm Imfisser) with TW asleep in another room (he has managed to avoid it) I had no choice but to call the doctor.

I live in some kind of ideal Maltese village: small, cute, quiet (except for the 300 festas) and with amazing customer service. Our housekeeper is local, our workmen are local and the doc turns up an hour after TW asks and consequently sends the pharmacist to deliver my medicines. Tal-holm; this time, for all the right reasons.

‘You look awful miskina!, our pharmacist, who I shall call Mary for reasons which will soon be clear, tells me. She reminds me of my mum and most of the time I want to hug her. She is so diligent and sweet that when I launched The Foodbook she not only stocked it and sold loads of it, but only did so after testing it herself, in the process losing 10 kilos and getting rid of her diverticulitis.

Of course I was not offended. I do look awful, my face pale and dry, my hair stringy. ‘I feel awful’ she told me, showing me the palm of her hand. It was a midnight blue, puffed up and seemingly extremely sore. ‘I was held up’ she told me ‘Again’. ‘Who by? Junkies?’. ‘Yes’ she said. ‘Local?’ [we literally have just one] ‘No. From Zebbug. I beat them up. That is why my hands are blue’.

To be faced by a woman who is almost 60 years old, on the verge of tears, completely furious yet petrified enough to beat up a couple of junkies so hard that they ran away, throwing the bills they had already pulled out of her cash register, is slightly befuddling yet amazingly heart-warming. ‘You should be proud of those bruises’ I told her ‘Every time you look at them remember that you’re an amazing woman and these people are total shits’.

From what she said – and at this point, the entire village, including of course, my housekeeper who filled me in, knows this story – a young woman walked into Mary’s pharmacy holding the hands of a small child. The pharmacist, who can, of course, tell a junkie a mile off, immediately was on the alert but obviously had no choice but to serve her. The moment she turned slightly ‘round, the woman’s companion rushed in from the outside, went behind the counter and started grabbing the money from the cash.

Mary, who was held up some time ago, that time at gunpoint, was having none of it. She beat him so hard he started throwing the bills back at her. Then, apparently, she beat up the woman until they both ran away.

Within minutes, the police had caught the bastards, using footage from the pharmacy cameras. They were the same ones who had apparently committed four hold ups in the past few months, including two in their home town.

I have no patience with junkies. Absolutely no patience at all. The very reason why most of them end up junkies to begin with is because there was never any discipline in their lives and then, after becoming total menaces to society, they get mollycoddled by huggers who want to ‘save’ them. With junk, there is nothing in anybody’s life but the junk itself, regardless of the risk to self, family and friends. Moreover, they are experts at cheating. As we say in Maltese: idawruk ma subajhom.

Some years ago a friend of mine, seemingly clean, was back on the needle. I only found this out after ferrying him around for months (he was using my lifts to deliver grams of junk to his fellow junkies so if we had been stopped in a road block or similar I would have been in massive trouble), trying to become the Treasurer for a student group I led (!) and asking me to sleep over, which, I admit, I found really odd. I guess if I had woken up one day and realised I had been cleaned out of my 14-inch student-life television and my video camera, my only two ‘valuable’ possessions, I would have realised what had happened. As it were, I sussed him out before. And never spoke to him again.

The Zebbug local council has proclaimed that it was stepping up its security measures after a spate of hold ups on old people in the locality. Fifteen years ago, the town was already riddled with junkies, which, to me, says that there is a huge social problem. Bringing in more police, cameras and private security serves to make a town more stressful to live in, rather than safer. Take a look at the UK, where this is palpable.

I have no solutions to this situation but frankly, stepping up on security is just, as usual, a panic reaction. It will solve absolutely nothing. Just like prison makes junkies out of those who aren't to begin with. If it were up to me – which these junkies can thank their lucky stars it isn’t – I would line them all up against a wall and help them get over whatever issues they have troubling them, basically, life.

In the meantime, I am living in a cute little village with a heroine for a pharmacist. Never was an ‘e’ so important.