Déjà vu - Mariana

Déjà vu

It’s not about the dress.  It’s about the Jaguar, the bags and the fliers....

I’m not about to say anything new.  After all, a few years back we had the same sword hanging over our heads and we’d moaned, we’d accused Government of all crimes under the sun, and we’d tried to revert to cloth…but then we'd shut up, because the shops gave Government's decree the finger and stopped charging us two cents for our plastic bags.

Now it’s not two Maltese currency cents, it’s fifteen Euro cents, but otherwise it’s a clear case of déjà vu. I know that’s a term one should avoid in Malta, because it tends to conjure disconcerting images of that lady tottering high up there in that dress - and we all know how notions of her tottering conjure the even more unsettling images of the same lady faltering in those tight, white boots in the embarrassment they chose to call the video of ‘Vertigo’.

But this is a genuine a case of déjà vu, so excuse me for the unsettling connotations.

Now, when that most benign-faced of politicians read that document of his in November, I was among the first to crawl sheepishly to my collection of little cloth bags, all folded neatly in a box under the kitchen sink.  That box was a reminder of how lazy I was, and how the threat of a two cents' charge (you know, before they stopped charging) had not been enough to make me care for the environment.  But now the stakes were higher: fifteen Euro cents is, even by the most generous of estimations, much more than two Maltese currency cents, which must have meant that the hole in our ozone layer must have grown loads bigger, or that the next great Ice Age was just around the corner or something of equal magnitude. Of course it couldn’t just be a case of Government needing to collect more money from us: our finances, I knew for a fact to be ‘fis-sod’. No this was just a nominal fee that the great people up there were using to remind us to care. 

I set a compartment in my ‘errands’ handbag and religiously counted out 10 bags and put them neatly inside.  Then I put one bag in my car ‘just in case’ and one in my husband’s, taking care to back that with a regular warning along the lines of, "Don’t forget...planet is burning," or, "Don’t forget...planet is freezing," depending on my mood.

Then, at check-out, I placed my shopping on the counter and whipped out my cloth bags, all ten of them proclaiming loudly: here is the dutiful housewife, doing her bit for the planet. However I was left open-mouthed, with cloth bag in hand, whilst the cashier cheerfully loaded my shopping into plastic bags.  

I gave my bag another tentative wave. "Ghadhom b'xejn hi s’issa," the cashier explained.  A couple of similar attempts later I realized that no one else, except for me, had dug out their cloth bags yet and it made me feel like a tree-hugging freak to keep assaulting cashiers with them whilst everyone else feasted on free plastic bags.  

I thought, "Give them a couple of weeks, then we’ll see a gradual increase in cloth bags."  No such thing!  Then I remembered that I was surrounded by Maltese people. These people don’t give a hoot if the planet burns or freezes over, these people will only raise a finger when it starts to touch their pockets.  So I decided not to look weird and put my cloth bags away to wait the 15th of January.  

"Unbelievable!  Such a clear plea from Government and no one seems to have heard," I mourned.  But I was wrong, my mother very definitely had heard.  Now my mother suffers from chronic CPH (Compulsive Plastic-bag Hoarding), and I was quite concerned with how she’d take all this.  Fact is, she had developed her own coping strategy and found solace in spreading the news around.  She called. "In a few weeks they’re going to start charging us for the bags.  Make sure you grab as many as you can now that they are still free.  Divide your shopping into more bags, don’t be stupid…," and then her universal advice on shopping, "Tpaxxihomx!" It is never clear who ‘they’ are in these cases, but one knows better than to question one’s mum about these things, much less take it up with any person who suffers from chronic CPH at such stressful times.

Then a week or so before D-Day I saw a familiar face on the news: the ‘Smart Supermarket guy’. Only, today he was the ‘Pavi guy’.  He was yapping on about a great move by Pavi: colossal and re-usable shopping bags for € 1 each.  They had thousands of them and the Minister was pleased.  

Immediately, I got a fresh sense of déjà vu (pardon the word).  I remembered a similar news item a few years back. That time they were Smart Supermarket bags and the Minister was probably someone who had now been reduced to a snoozing backbencher.  Everyone and his mum had bought those bags, even I had them. My heart sank. Where were those bags now?  Where were they, in fact, a couple of months after they’d been bought?  Most people had probably thrown them away - the same people whom I saw, everyday, still using plastic bags. The same people who’d unknowingly coerced me to do the same till the 15th. The same, yet again, who would tomorrow be queuing to buy these € 1 bags from Pavi. The same (my heart sank) who would throw them away, in a couple of months, when shops stopped charging us for bags.  And who’d have gotten anything from this entire hullabaloo on the eight o’clock news?  The ‘Pavi guy’ of course: a free advert on prime-time TV and all those Euros flowing in for those impractical (I happen to know, I got one), and on the whole, useless bags.  

And then it happened! The 15th happened! I went shopping, with my arsenal of cloth bags, happy to at last be able to use them without feeling so weird.  But I was dumbfounded - no one had them yet.  I put my things on the counter, and once more failed to out-rush the cashier.  She’d filled two plastic bags before I had time to take over. And even as I explained I’d brought my own bags, she was already saying, "Ghadhom b’xejn hi."   

B’xejn? This was enough to give one, excuse me, vertigo. I mean, wasn't it even going to take two months this time, for the system to crumble?  I'd shopped and shopped (not to study the plastic bags situation but because it’s what I do), and no one had charged me a cent whilst plastic and paper bags were thrown at me as generously as ever.

Silly me to think people would listen to the Government’s plea to be green.  Sillier the Government, if it had ever believed that the shortcut to a green nation is through imposed fines on shopping.  There is no shortcut to a green country: it takes years of preparation, years of education and most importantly years of leading by example.  After all, how could the same people who’d sent us countless and endlessly repetitive fliers and thick booklets, printed on the most luxurious paper, to win our votes just a few months back expect us to turn green all of a sudden?  How dare the same people who’d preached  about using small cars, yet bought themselves Jaguars with our money, expect us to do otherwise?

If anything, so far, this plastic bag farce seems to have had the opposite result to what Government had intended: more waste is being created. Everyone seems to know that the new Pavi bags will need to be thrown out again one day, and in the meanwhile, more plastic bags than are probably needed are being grabbed while they’re free - you know, my Mum and CPH!

The mind boggles: one is left wondering whether a reduction in the use of plastic bags and a love for the environment was the motivation behind this farce in the first place. Guesses, anyone?