The litter lady

NOTA BENE: This post was written quite a while ago but my editor in chief felt it portrayed the people who have welcomed us and made us feel at home in a poor light, however, our stroll yesterday made me think even harder so this post needs to be read in the light of “EC was here .... and here .... and here ....”

Beautiful morning. Lovely coffee. Marvellous views all round.

A lady has just returned to her new white Seat parked between two palms about 100metres from where I’m sat. She lifts the tailgate and proceeds to deposit her copious amounts of shopping in it but not before unwrapping the items and dropping the rubbish at the base of the palm behind her. She stands by the driver’s door, elegantly lights a cigarette and drives off.

I’m not shocked by this although a week or two ago I certainly would have been. She encapsulates all that is wrong with this place. It’s not ruined by the out of control building, it may be a blight but it’s just supply and demand and I have to admit that if I had to choose between Blackpool and having my legs broken and being sent to Voldemort I’d choose the latter knowing that if I ordered one early enough I could get a mobility scooter with wide wheels.

No, the blight that afflicts this place is the attitude of the people who live here to it. The rubbish dumped by every minor road as you leave or enter town is impossible to ignore. Mostly building detritus but a fridge, a TV, an old suite or whatever will punctuate every few metres and if the road is built on a bank there’ll be a local tip established.

The towns are pretty free of dumped goods, if not litter but nowhere is free of the results of a nation of uncontrolled dog owners. The puddles and piles are everywhere. The smell and satins left by the puddles are utterly obnoxious, some places far worse than others especially if you leave the main thoroughfares. So many dogs allowed and encouraged to do what they do by their owners in spite of the comprehensive and quite graphic signage requesting that they don’t. Some, but far fewer than a majority clean up afterwards.

However, a shower of rain and all is well for an hour or two. The smells decay and await refreshment which is very soon in coming but no amount of rain can wash away the graffiti. It, too, is everywhere. A few metres from where I’m writing this there is a small area graced by narrow streets, colourful houses three or four storeys high but only a couple of metres wide. At the top of one street there’s a retaining wall that has at some point in the recent past been faced with marble. In a couple of places the marble is obviously beautifully patterned by the geologic processes that made it. You have to look hard though as it is covered in the senseless spraying of the talentless and mindless.

All the graffiti is the same as you see in railway cuttings but here it’s not restricted to those places. Efforts are made to clean it off but on the Valor wall by the escalators in the park it’s got graffiti on graffiti. Not only mindless but tasteless, too, quite revolting in some examples. A building in Voldemort on the sea front called Edificio El Greco typifies the blight, irony comes as an extra.

Like the dog fouling, the wall fouling has been difficult to avoid these past weeks. It’s like they simply don’t value the place but on a massive scale. I know these blight the UK too, but nowhere near as much as here. I guess it could be that it has no value because it all comes easily when the club you’re in bails you out and the consequences are easier to live with than having to do something about it.