A few doors down from where I live is a development of 4 houses that are all very nice if you like houses that look a bit like aircraft hangers. Architect designed, I guess. There is a gate to the driveway and at the top of the drive, just outside the gate, are 4 letter boxes, painted a similarly tasteful-but-bland gray as everything else in the development.
In Australia, it seems, newspapers are typically delivered by a middle aged guy in a car. These "delivery boys" will slow their car a little and throw the paper from the window of the still-moving car in the general direction of the letter box. When I was a boy back in England it was traditional for the delivery boy to put papers in letterboxes. And papers were mostly delivered by schoolkids. But I digress.
Under the letter boxes is the slowly mushing remains of a number of newspapers. It looks a bit of a mess actually. But no-one seems to care. Each day as I walk past I see the mush sitting there. Must have been there for at least a month, probabaly more. Every so often a new paper arrives.
Each day the people who live in those four houses need to come and go through that gate, and each Tuesday, bin-day, they must wheel their garbage bins past the mush to the edge of the street. And each day of each week of the at-least-a-month not one person has tidied up the mess. The rest of the development looks all super-stylish in a glass and dull grey hanger way. I wonder why they let the papers shit the place up?
This is what I have come up with. None of the people living in these four houses recognise the papers - there are at least 3 - as their own. So each and every person has decided that they're not going to pick up someone else's litter, no matter that the now-not-paper-but-rubbish sits on their shared driveway - so sits on the property or each and every one of the residents. Maybe it is because the papers sit just outside of the gate, a gate that shuts them off from the rest of the street, maybe the rest of the world. Maybe a world that they are scared of or do not care for. Who knows?
To balance things a little. Our street is actually a very nice street where the hermits are in a the minority. Our neighbours and us share each other's bins when ours are full and if we see that the neighbours bins are still out in the evening we may wheel them back. In fact, when I had to go back to the UK a couple of years ago Vince even cut the lawn in front of our place when he finished cutting his own. We, you see, do not live behind gates.
Ho-hum.
(for the record, I have seen people coming and going - in their cars, of course, I have not had the opportunity to speak to any of the begated ones - so it's not a case of the papers are building up because all the residents have been murdered and no one has noticed. Well, I don't think it is.)
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