TWO sounds will forever remind me of Italy. The first is the hammering and drilling of builders, who seem employed in a perpetual cycle of reconstruction. The other is the gentle swish of a broom. Shopkeepers, householders, restaurateurs are constantly brushing the pavement and steps and gutters outside their premises. In Lucca, in Tuscany, where I’m staying, the road sweeper’s van does the rounds at day-break, so punctual you don’t need an alarm clock.
Not so back home, where a report from Keep Scotland Beautiful has confirmed what many of us have suspected, namely that we are fast becoming a slovenly, selfish and sluttish nation. Littering, graffiti and fly tipping are at their worst in 10 years, blighting the lives of an estimated million of us, especially in less affluent areas. Yet even in leafy East Lothian where until recently I lived, the view of the park would often be ruined by the detritus of polystyrene cartons and plastic bottles left in fairy rings, like overnight outcrops of toadstools. Only a handful of folk would ever stoop to pick this garbage up, the rest waiting for the council refuse department to deal with it. Or for the wind to blow it all into the sea, for birds and fish to swallow.
Obviously good cleansing services are essential to the running of our towns and cities. But unless we are prepared to pay extortionate council tax, there is a limit to what the state can provide. At some point – and we seem now to have reached it – individuals must take responsibility, not only for their own refuse but, to an extent, for others’ too. And as anyone knows who has tried to organise a communal effort to clean up a beach, say, or a river path, there are plenty of public-minded individuals willing to give their time for the greater good. You could call them the litterati.
Volunteers alone, however, cannot change a culture in which wantonly chucking things away is seen as acceptable. You can blame the surge in fly tipping on the cost or the time it takes to arrange a council heavy-uplift, but you would do better to point to those who are simply too lazy to book such services, or too mean to pay for them. They don’t care that they are spoiling the place for everybody else. And the problem is that such an outlook is contagious. One abandoned sofa or barbecue leads to another, and to a way of thinking that is implicitly threatening and aggressive.
No wonder Keep Scotland Beautiful concludes that the welter of litter and waste affects people’s mental and physical wellbeing. Knowing your neighbours don’t give a toss about the view from your kitchen, or the mess they leave for you to step over at the bus stop, is not conducive to a good night’s sleep or your sense of security. Nor to suggesting a communal effort to improve things. In some of the more afflicted estates, which have become graveyards for junk, you don’t need an overheated imagination to anticipate the response you might get to that quaint idea.
Nor is this a class issue, as some would like to believe. A posh colleague was once indignant when she threw away her cigarette in Edinburgh’s George Street, and was issued with a £50 fine. Her indignation suggested she felt such retribution should have been levelled at people other than her.
Quite apart from unappealing hauteur, this reflects a society in which civic pride and personal accountability have been lost. Not everything is perfect here in Lucca, and in parts of Italy back-street squalor is appalling. But in a well-regulated place like this, the emphasis on appearances is instructive. Where there is a collective effort and will to maintain standards, it has a knock-on, self-regulating and beneficent effect.
That outlook is exactly what we need. Rubbish left to moulder as eyesores and health hazards should be seen not as a minor problem that only fusspots fret over, but as a symptom of a deeper social issue: neglect, contempt and disdain for others. Education is key to changing people’s perception of their surroundings. But so too is stricter enforcement of existing laws. While throwing away a fag end scarcely merits a mention on the Richter scale of crimes, it would if millions of us did it every day. Penalties for this and other littering infringements are on the books for a reason: nobody should have to tolerate someone else’s spat-out gum.
Effective environmental policing is, unfortunately, expensive and until there is a national windfall, we need other strategies. Foremost among these is creating a climate in which despoiling the place where you live is seen as antisocial and pathetic. For a country that invented penicillin and Dolly the sheep, it cannot be beyond our wit to come up with a campaign to catch people’s attention and instil a lifelong intolerance of mess. I don’t care much about godliness, but cleanliness matters, and it needs a big push.
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