I once told a surgeon that all four of my grandparents ate what they liked, when they liked, and never knowingly took any form of exercise, yet all lived to a very ripe old age indeed. One of them was still buzzing around, living alone, doing her shopping and debating the horrors of Saddam Hussein, when she was pushing a century. “It makes it very hard for me to seriously take all the propaganda about healthy lifestyles”, I said – “except for smoking”, which I hate, with its indisputable “drip-drip-drip” of slow poison into the body.
I was rewarded with a stern expression and told that people like me, who were born in the 1960s, cannot compare themselves to people like my grandparents, who were born in the first six years of the 20th century. “In those days, it was a case of the survival of the fittest,” the surgeon said. “If a child survived the first five years of life when there was so much disease and so little medical care, then probably it was a constitutionally stronger than average.”
The message was that we babies of the hippie age onwards did not go through that natural weeding-out process, and so the genetically weaker ones survived too, because of good medical care, better hygiene and superior nutrition. That means that we cannot take things for granted and have to look after ourselves. Still, I wasn’t convinced. If all my grandparents defied the odds of those early years, and it was due to genetic strength, couldn’t I assume that I too am genetically strong? “Certainly not,” came the snapped reply.
Well, I’ll take my chances. It would be a hard life without being able to eat anything and everything whenever I pleased, and I was designed to lie on a sofa with a book, while others pound the treadmill at the gym. I don’t believe in unnecessary suffering, despite the best efforts of my catechism teachers in the dark and dire 1970s to teach me that such suffering will bring me closer to God. Life throws enough suffering at us unexpectedly. The last thing we should do is masochistically seek out more.
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A few days ago I was reminded about the above mentioned surgeon’s words, about the survival of the fittest when I read an excerpt from The Daily Malta Chronicle of 100 years ago – the very period when my grandparents were infants – which gave some demographic information. Between 17 and 23 December 1905 – a single week – 47 children under the age of five died in Malta. The number was noted in a matter of fact fashion, so many child deaths in just a week were the norm, rather than the exception.
Taken as a pattern, we are looking at the shocking figure of around 2,500 dead children over the course of a year. The Daily Malta Chronicle, as though discussing the balance of payments, reassured its readers that “the excess of births over deaths continues to be noticeable” – 167 babies had been born that week, more than enough to make good for the 47 who had died. How frightening it must have been, how much better off we are now, no matter what we think. Natural selection is all very well when it comes to plants and animals, but where human babies are concerned, it’s an absolute “no-no”.
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There was another interesting little number in that old newspaper story. Of those 167 babies born, 99 were boys and 68 were girls. I had been given to understand that, in the natural order of things, more boys are born than girls because boy babies tend to be weaker and less likely to survive infancy. But a third more boys than girls seems quite an extraordinary number, and if it happened as a rule, matters must have been righted, horribly, by the “Grim Reaper”.
With today’s low birth rate, such huge imbalances between the numbers of boys and girls do not occur, which is just as well because, with our good medical care and one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, they would all survive and we would soon be sinking under a surplus of boys. Finally, it really would be raining men.
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So, finally, we are to be penalised for littering. When the wardens held a practice run, giving us mock tickets to show us how the system will work, it turned out that the greatest number of pretend fines they meted out was to those who took out their household rubbish more than one hour before collection time. This bothered the Environment Minister, who said that he hoped the wardens would not use the new rules to focus on such petty misdemeanors, instead of on the “important” offences.
If it bothers him so much, then he should do the decent thing and have this rule amended, or look at some other options that bring us in line with the 21st century and the fact that greater numbers of houses and apartments are empty during the day.
I have written about this before, but seeing as the wardens are so determined to penalise those who take out their rubbish more than one hour before it is collected, and, realising the authorities live in a dream-world, where every home has a housewife on hand, ready to pop down with the rubbish at 10am, 11am, midday, 1pm or even 6pm, then I am going to write about it again.
This rule is completely senseless. Most people cannot take out their rubbish just one hour before collection time because, quite simply, they are not at home to do it. They are at work, at school, at university, or about their business. The days of the stay-at-home housewife, waiting for the horns of the bread-van, the milkman, the vegetable vendor, the paraffin hawker and taz-zibel are long gone. My parents live in Sliema, where the rubbish is collected at around midday. How many working people are at home to take out the rubbish between 11am and midday? Only those who work the night-shift, and they’re asleep.
Where my office is, in Ta’ Xbiex, the rubbish is collected at around 1pm. Because this is where I work, I can take down the rubbish at the right time – but the people who live here and work somewhere else have no choice but to take out their rubbish at 8am when they leave home, or take it out for collection only once a week, on Saturday – when instead of going out to do their errands, meet friends, or have a trot round the shops and a coffee, they are expected to rush back home at midday to take out a week’s worth of dustbin-bags.
What is this madness? Rubbish is collected all over Europe, in ways far more complicated than ours (decomposable waste on Mondays, plastic on Tuesdays, glass on Wednesdays, paper on Thursdays), yet nowhere are people expected to sit at home, instead of going to work or elsewhere, to take out their bags at precisely 11am. I am exasperated that the authorities so often need reminding that rubbish collection is an essential service and not a favour, and so it should be fashioned to suit us, rather than to suit the service-provider.
If the authorities do not wish to have the streets spoiled by rubbish left outside front doors between 8am and lunchtime – and in this they are right, because it is a horrible sight, especially in the summer heat – then the only way to solve it is to get the rubbish trucks to collect the rubbish early in the morning, as they used to do for as far back as I can remember. The sound of clattering dustbins and shouting dustbin-men has always been an early-morning sound, the sort of sound that woke you up. It was only relatively recently that they began coming round at 11am, midday, and 1pm, probably because it is more convenient for them to do this, or because they are far too few trucks to go round.
Well, it is not convenient for the rest of us, because we are not at home at 11am and midday. We are at work, or out with our friends and seeing to errands. What kind of a government makes its people sit at home for half the morning, waiting to take out the rubbish? There was a very good reason why rubbish was always collected between 7am and 8am: because that was when people put it outside, before leaving the house to attend to other business. This foolish, nonsensical rule has to be rewritten, and meanwhile, the wardens have to be instructed accordingly. Nobody should be fined for failing to take out their rubbish just before collection, when collection takes place at the extraordinary time of midday.