I stopped at the ATM the other day. My transaction completed, I turned towards the bin for receipts – only to find a slice of pizza with congealed cheese and shrivelled olives wedged in at the top.

A flurry of receipts littered the ground. A couple of steps away a large puddle of rank-smelling vomit steamed in the hot sun. Just beyond that, two overflowing bins took up the best part of the pavement. Takeaway boxes were strewn around them. Several sandwich boards posed further obstacles to pedestrians.

A fume-belching coach idled in the road. Gaggles of tourists waited for the bus. Others sat down on doorsteps munching on more takeaways and swigging from beer cans. A bare-chested man snored away in another doorway, his haversack doubling up as a pillow. Cigarette butts were ground out in a pot of wilting geraniums placed outside by some hopeful resident.

All this within a five-metre radius of a four-star hotel and a couple of tourist excursion agencies with glorious pictures of a turquoise crystal-clear Blue Lagoon, rolling green fields underneath Mdina, a quaint luzzu-studded St Julian’s and a night scene of a brightly-lit Paceville.

The difference between the ads and reality was stark. The marketing was of a beautiful, picturesque, vibrant island. The reality is a filthy, congested, uncivil place with the infrastructure groaning with the weight of residents and the influx of tourists.

A filthy, congested, uncivil place with the infrastructure groaning with the weight of residents and the influx of tourists

The situation on the ground is one which is best described by the Italian ‘degrado’ – akin to ‘degradation’ but mostly used in relation to places overrun by tourists. It is one where there is a visible deterioration in the quality of life, where the town exists as a consumer product to be seen and experienced but not as a place to be lived in, with the result that residents no longer feel welcome in the place which they once called home.

I’ve seen this before – most notably in Venice which is the most beautiful and the saddest city at the same time. The absolute gloriousness of the city is fast becoming obscured by the sheer weight of people visiting it. The authorities cannot cope with the hordes who descend upon the city littering, crowding and generally turning it into a tourist theme park where anything goes.

The last time I visited, a group of the ever-shrinking number of Venetian citizens were deeply indignant at the behaviour of a tourist who had simply hitched her skirt up above her waist and relieved herself in the lagoon in full view of passers-by. That it is wrong on so many levels barely merits saying. And yet it happens and continues to happen with the authorities apparently helpless to act in the face of such behaviour.

We’re seeing much of the same thing happening here. Only last week the papers reported a mattress and a large suitcase being dumped outside – not in some forgotten country layby, but at St George’s Bay, the heart of Malta’s entertainment mecca.  The Cleaning Directorate disposed of the mattress but the accumulation of detritus can still be seen onsite, as it does on much of the island.

Incidentally a quasi-identical incident happened in July last year, following the collection and removal of 192 tonnes of illegally discarded waste in Birkirkara. Within hours another mattress had been discarded. It’s as if we are stuck in a loop with precisely the same sort of problem cropping up repeatedly.

Which makes it even more surreal to be reading the grandiose declarations which seem to make up the blueprint for the country’s future. We are to be “the best in the world”, “a Silicon Valley for startups”, “a bridge across North and South”, “provide a diversified tourism product” and the perennial “hub”. It’s so wearying when utterly divorced from reality. I’d rather we did away with all the nauseating marketing and supplying an army of cleaners with brooms and buckets.

We could also deploy a phalanx of wardens from their hide-outs outside tunnels to fine those who are responsible for littering. Public-spirited NGOs and individuals are doing their bit and organising clean-ups, but it is high time the authorities stepped in and helped stop this descent into filth and chaos.

drcbonello@gmail.com