PresentTense:People arriving into Dublin city centre on Monday morning were met by an eerie sight: muck-caked Wellington boots, abandoned in groups, as if an army of visiting farmers had been struck by a mass outbreak of spontaneous combustion.
Except, of course, the footwear had until recently been wrapped around the sodden, unhappy feet of Oxegen's festival goers. The pinks and blues and polka dots that occasionally peeked through the caked mud betrayed that fact. As did their presence at the bus stops at which thousands had been disgorged, determined that they should never again encounter such atrocious conditions. And if they must, they'd do it in a new pair.
Because there was no way they were going to clean those wellies. It would take longer to do that than it did to get out of the Punchestown car park. Besides, they only cost 20 quid, or whatever, so it'll only cost another 20 quid next year. That's a minor expense against the price of festival tickets, beer, clothes and food. It's not as if they'll be required for occasional walks. They had been bought for one reason and one reason only. So they were left at the point at which they immediately became superfluous - although it appears that some taxi drivers may have been complicit in this welly holocaust, as they refused to pick up the punters unless the wellies were dumped.
This could begin to sound somewhat cranky; another tut-tut against the culture of disposability that is endemic amongst a certain age group. But there are enough people to do that, most from an Emergency generation that wastes little and keeps everything. Who bought wellies in 1963 and still have them, even though they haven't used them since 1964. Who shake their heads at how a country has gone from being one of Want to one of Waste. Who wouldn't let anyone leave the table until every bit of dinner was eaten, whose cupboards are filled with everything they have ever bought, and whose houses are overflowing with unused items and will be until their offspring have to some day go through them and chuck them out anyway.
This, as we already know, is an age of disposability. It's not necessarily a bad thing. There isn't a place on earth where people don't want to be so rich that they can discard whatever they want. I recently spent some time in a town in northern Ethiopia, where the market was busy with stalls that specialised in the sorts of things we throw out without a thought, such as piles of plastic bags and hanging baskets of water bottles. One street vendor sold various watch parts. It was an odd sight to someone who comes from a country in which - unless it was handed down to you by your grandfather who wore it in the GPO during the Easter Rising - a broken watch is just replaced.
That market can accurately be judged as representing a resourcefulness that our culture has swiftly left behind, but it's also a town doing its best to sell enough spare parts that it can become rich enough never to need them again.
Our casual waste is not a uniquely Irish thing. When the revellers finally filtered away from Glastonbury, they left behind an estimated 15,000 tents. There were similar numbers at Glasgow's T in the Park. Nor is it a generational thing. Most of us have become conditioned to accept disposability, be it from our household appliances, cameras or stereos. If something breaks, we are as likely to just buy a new one as to find one of the dwindling number of people who actually fix such things. If it happens within an acceptable time frame - say, every two years or so - it hardly impacts on our judgement of a brand. Apple has based much of its sales strategy on this attitude. When an iPod breaks, it's ridiculously difficult to repair. And people want the newer, sexier model anyway. So they buy a new one, ignoring how quickly the previous one died.
However, the problem with the wellies was not so much that they were left, but that they were dumped where they were. The tents that were abandoned at Oxegen's sites were at least harvested for charity, as with those at last year's Electric Picnic. Cheap tents, which hungover people have no interest in rolling into a splodgy ball and bringing home on the off-chance of being used again, were instead collected by scouts and sent to Darfur. That's a pretty good consequence of our culture of disposability.
But the city's wellie infestation betrayed a few things. Firstly, that a lot of people have grown used to living in a society in which there's always someone there to pick up after us. Who? Dublin City Council, which, realising they were beyond saving, destroyed the wellies.
Secondly, the littering of the streets revealed that there are plenty for whom the whole anti-pollution, pro-green thing can be discarded as quickly as the boots.
And finally, that this article has succumbed to a bit of tut-tutting after all.
Please dispose of this carefully.
