Livid about litter
I REMEMBER being quite an angry young thing as a teenager. I didn’t really rail against my parents, nothing quite as domestic as that. Nope, I was pretty upset with the whole world. I marched for the miners and wrote letters for Amnesty International. I rocked against racism and organised sponsored silences for those poor whales.
Twenty years on I still care, of course I do. But now I harass my local council with requests for a weed clean-up outside the house so we don’t get infested by mosquitoes, and I have also developed a system of eye-rolling when greeted with poor service in restaurants. Forget the ‘big’ issues, increasingly I find myself tooth-grindingly angry at the everyday incivilities of modern life.
I offer you a slice of the things that have wound me up this week: a trendy café where the ‘gastro’ had more to do with gastroenteritis than gastronomy, and the service was as lukewarm as the food; inconsiderate intolerable drivers in the morning when I’m doing the school run; dog owners who think dog dirt is like manna to my trainers when I go running, and the person who had his car radio turned up so loud outside my house that the windows rattled. Oh well, at least that one’ll be deaf before he’s 40.
I find myself saying “You’re welcome!” in ringing tones to every dull-eyed oaf who thinks it’s their birthright that I hold the door open for them, or hover patiently while they enter or leave a shop or café. I particularly like the expression “I see we’re going to have to build an extension on that charm school”, which a friend of mine uses for instances of spectacular retail and restaurant rudeness.
In my defence, I really don’t care what goes on behind other people’s closed doors. It’s only when they take their shabby behaviour into the public arena that I start to get riled. As a student I may have lived in places that made the Steptoes’ place look like a suite at the Ritz, but I would never have dreamed of taking my slovenliness out the front door. I’d no more have dropped litter than I would have bought South African oranges.
Given my heightened sensitivities, it was perhaps not the wisest move to buy an office right next to a bus stop that’s Rubbish Central for Nicosia’s litter-ati. Crisp packets, beer cans, fag packets: I have to wade through all of these just to get to my front door. I approached the house yesterday to see two teenage girls — all combats, high heels and lip gloss — standing by the bus stop ripping up paper into tiny bits and flinging the pieces on the pavement. I bent down and started picking them one by one. Above me, I could hear much sucking of teeth and snorting.
I looked up. “Madam, me picking up your rubbish does not demean me, it demeans you,” I said, realising too late that they did not speak a word of Greek or English. I suddenly thought: I am not Miss Marple and this is not St Mary Mead.
Am I turning into one of those mad old bats we used to laugh at when we were kids? Like my old neighbour Mr Wallis, who ran out of his house in his vest every Sunday and drew his hand menacingly across his throat every time my friend and I played anything louder than Chinese whispers on the path that ran between his house and ours. Maybe.
But before you think I’m some sort of curmudgeonly grumpy old cow, I tip wildly for good service, write effusive thank you notes with only the slightest provocation, and when I was last in London I astonished a homeless old guy so much with my generosity that he tore up his ‘hungry and homeless’ sign. And I strongly believe that virtue is its own reward, as all of these small acts of kindness make me as happy as their recipients.
So is life too short to worry about a dropped crisp packet? Of course it is, if that’s all it is. Low-level anti-social behaviour blights all of our lives every day in a way that some of the bigger issues might not. It makes us feel like aliens in our own space; vulnerable in the very places we should feel most at home. We may all care about the ozone layer, but it does not, in me at least, induce the same heart-sinking feeling I get when I walk through my local park and see that all of the newly-planted trees have been snapped off at the trunk.
My grandmother may have been right when she said that good manners cost nothing. Civility is cheap and environmentally friendly too. And it may do more to knit together the fragile communities of our little island than any government-dictated urban renewal schemes.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
