Bill Stickers is guilty

Unfortunately, it seems that Dubai is one place where the Goat's particular incarnation of Mr William Stickers is not going to be prosecuted.

Not a day goes past without unsolicited crap being hung on the gate of the Crumbling Villa. The cast alimininium curlicues all over the outside of the gate seem to encourage the practice. The Goat isn't particularly interested in the new pizza joint, nursery school, hair salon or dental clinic; he has little use for a borehole in the garden (which is apparently illegal anyway), and always gets his cooking gas from the same outfit. So it's futile hanging the garbage on the garage.

One thing is certain. The Goat always removes the paperwork and stacks it unread on the footway for collection. If that constitutes littering, then address the cause and not the effect. If you prevent everyone from plastering the Crumbling Villa with junk, the Goat won't dump it in the street. Simples.

Just lately, things have got worse. Cars parked outside get additional copies of the same handbills stuffed in the door handles and under the windscreen wipers. These blow off eventually, but the Goat will certainly not read them, nor avail himself of the product or service advertised. The purveyors of cooking gas and of satellite TV rather unfortunately have self-adhesive stickers that get plastered by the elusive Mr Stickers all over the Goat's electricity meter cabinet. They get removed and dumped.

The Goat made the mistake of leaving the gate open the other day. He found yet more junk, left all over his parked motorbike and even shoved under the BACK door of the Crumbling Villa.

He's tried complaining. The Municipality seems to do nothing, and calling the number advertised on the junk results in somewhere between: "The manager isn't available, and will return your call" (which he doesn't, of course), to "Neanderthal grunt."

On the rare occasions when the Goat catches Bill Stickers in flagrante lectaro, on the footway on his motorbike, and asks him to refrain from littering, the relief is extremely short-lived. About ten minutes. Then it's back to paper and plastic waste being stuck to the wall, attached to the car, shoved in the gate, hurled over the wall into the front yard, and even hand-delivered under the Crumbling Villa's door.

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Litter

One of the wonderful things about living in the Lands of the Sand is that it’s possible to go and picnic or camp in the desert pretty much wherever and whenever you like. The seriously equipped 4x4 fraternity might go so far off the beaten track that they’re almost off the edge of the map where “there be monsters!” Others can and do simply pull off the edge of the road and have their picnic and campfire right next to the motorway.

I’ve never really understood the allure of sitting on a sand dune about ten metres off the slow lane of the Barracuda Expressway and having a picnic with traffic roaring past. Surely, people, you could find a quiet road and sit ten metres away from that?

But the thing that gets right up my nose is the monstrous mound of miasmic mess that invariably seems to get left behind. I was appalled recently to drive past a group of picnickers in the desert one day, and then to see the unspeakable quantity of garbage that they’d left behind when I drove past a day later. As a desert camper, I am fully aware of how much effort it takes to stick litter in a plastic bag, take that bag back to civilisation, and dump it in a roadside wheelie bin on the way home. That’s in, please, not next to. There really is no excuse for leaving paper and plastic plates, cutlery, tins, bottles, broken tents and crash-damaged kites in the desert where they were dropped. Laziness (with a possible hint of stupidity and a soupçon of arrogance) are reasons; they’re not excuses, and certainly not justification.

I guess there’s an ingrained “someone else will tidy it up” philosophy. This works fine in town where legions of Men In Orange fight the constant battle against fag packets, drink cans and plastic bags that have, for one reason or another, failed to find their way into dustbins. But this doesn’t work in the desert. Bizarrely, some picnickers bag up the rubbish and then leave it behind. Why? Do they expect the binmen to scour the open desert on the off-chance that they’ll find a black bag to collect? Or will some animal find it, open it and then choke to death on a polythene bag?

And then we have periodic “Desert Clean-Up” campaigns in which groups of concerned people show up with the laudable intention of denuding an area of beach or dunes of all rubbish. And thus “someone else will tidy it up” becomes true, which confirms that it’s OK to leave trash lying around.

If a Clean-Up produces a truckful of trash, the event is hailed as a huge success. It isn’t. The fact that the trash was lying around proves the message that “littering is unacceptable” is not getting through. A huge success is when, at the end of the day, the volunteer litter-pickers all come up empty-handed.

I’m not holding my breath.

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