Step on it
April 4, 2010
When did people stop walking up escalators? (This is pet rant No. 1794, just to warn you – doubtless only the first of plenty to be vented here.) Or down them, indeed: when did escalators stop being a mechanism with which to ascend or descend a staircase faster, and become one that does all the work for you, despite thereby taking longer than with stationary stairs?
Of course there have always been some who need or choose to stand and be carried – the infirm, the heavily pregnant, the otherwise encumbered – and of course that’s partly the point of an escalator. But it used to be understood that they’d keep to the right, so that those seeking speed could do so in the left-hand lane.
Now most people step on, stop short, and settle themselves where they feel like over the thoroughfare, so that it stops being a thoroughfare. So that if you want to be an active escalator user, you have to be a bit pushy, act impatient and say ‘Excuse me’, and I just bet that this shift in behaviour overlaps with the onset of what’s now widely known as the obesity epidemic. It likewise ties in with the perniciously prevailing presumption that if a machine can take the place of some human task or activity, then by definition it should do: it must be doing it better, or be better that’s it’s doing it, whereas in fact all sorts of hard-to-quantify but crucial stuff tends to be lost in such substitutions. In the escalator context, it’s not only that such contrary slothfulness reflects and feeds our chronic de-habituation to physical exertion as part of everyday life, it’s also the way it signifies how insular social norms have become. At the risk of sounding 97 years old, I’m sure that consideration for others’ convenience used to be a much more integral, automatic factor in most people’s public behaviour, whereas now, all too often, it doesn’t seem to cross their minds.
Not to get too sourly sunk in ranting – though I do feel better for getting that off my chest – I was at a very fine gig last night, courtesy of the very wonderful Treacherous Orchestra: 13 of Scotland’s finest young male instru/mentalists, on their sixth night riding the rollercoaster of their first ever tour. It was great to hear some new material, as well as the old favourites, and the balance of balls and brains in their best numbers – besides the awesome massed firepower – is truly exceptional and thrilling. What they really have to focus on, though, is making the sounds that only they can make, of which there certainly seems to be no shortage – but it’s the points in tonight’s set where I found myself thinking, oh, this is like Capercaillie, or Shooglenifty, or Croft No. Five, or the Unusual Suspects, which represent the pitfalls they need to avoid. Those bases are covered, by the originals, and for anyone else they tend to represent a lapse towards the generic, or flabby, and there just ain’t no room for that round here right now.
