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| 150 years of business - 10 years of news |
There are many, many things I love about living in the UK (specifically, Devil’s Bridge, Aberystwyth and Wales in general). I love the fact that not everything is available all the time; 24/7 everything is not healthy. I love the fact that headlines in my very local paper include things like ‘sandwich stolen’ and ‘sheep in nappy causes problems on prom’. Lots of things around here make me smile contently, knowing that although I’ll always call Olympia ‘home’, I am exactly where I want to be. Having said that…
…some things about this fucking back-woods, coal-digging, banjo-playing timewarp of a country really wind me up. Some of them are pretty serious – others are seriously petty. Case of the latter in point: Devil Doors.
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| Devil Doors mock me |
This British phenomenon is something my friend G and I noticed the first time we were here in 1992. Here’s the situation: two doors available, only one open. I don’t know how to put it any plainer than that. Imagine you’re in a hallway full of busy students (or shoppers, or commuters… take your pick of any human herd scenario) and, en masse, you approach a set of double doors. ‘Easy!’, you think, ‘one door will be open for people going in one direction, the other will be open for those wishing to travel in the opposite way. It’ll be like the God of Circulation intended: peaceful, non-confrontational and efficient co-existent mobilisation.’ You’d think that, and you’d be wrong! The hallway is jammed tight. People are pushing, shoving and cursing their way to and fro with unbelievable effort. What should have been a two-minute amble has turned into a ten-minute upstream struggle of salmonic proportions. Why? Is it because some unnatural force has put far too many people in that hallway? Maybe someone has dropped a folder and are causing a bit of traffic jam? Maybe there’s a fire and people are panicking! Nope, nope and nope.
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| doors the way God intended |
The reason – the only reason – that this journey is anything other than the serene jaunt from A to B that it should have been is that only one of the doors is unlocked. A quick flip of the bolting mechanism as you forearm rip your way through the bottleneck (which, by the way, attracts the most incredulous of looks from witnesses who don’t seem to be able to grasp either the sense in what you’ve done or the audacity that allowed you to make such a bold move in the first place) and you’ve solved the problem for generations to come. Or, at least until the next day when the person in charge of Unlocking the Doors decides that it’s way too much effort to unlock both doors. Well, he/she has a point: it is twice the work. But they’re doors, for Christ’s sake… if they’re not unlocked, they may as well be walls and if the architects wanted walls instead of doors then they probably wouldn’t have put hinges on them in the first place.
Next time, I’ll talk about steps. But other than steps and doors, I really love it here. Oh, and the food. Don’t get me started on the food. Yeah, so: steps, doors and food. And TV. Steps, doors, food, and TV. I’m sure that’s all.
Puppets. Remind me to tell you about puppets.
it is one of the illogical and mystifying things about the UK. Wardens, Caretakers, all those in charge of doors do it deliberately, it's just their way of hitting back at an unfair world. The other amazing thing is how often there is no sticker, handle, warning, anything to, actually, notify you that there is a pane of glass there..I still recall doing a pretty awesome face plant right into a plate glass door when I was a kid. Here is another one a German mate could not get his head round: Why window in UK houses open outwards, so you need a man with a ladder to wash them..he said, in Germany, they open in such a way that you clean them from the inside. I know new designs are now available but you wonder who thought it up. As a kid I lived nine floors up in a flat and the windows opened outwards.
ReplyDeleteHa! Mark, I'll add that to the list! I also don't get handles on doors that you're meant to push, and push-pads on doors you're meant to pull. But that might just be me...
ReplyDeleteOr BT's fault reporting line which asks you if you are phoning from the line you wish to talk about AND then asks you if you are able to make and receive calls on it...errr...yeah..
ReplyDeleteWe had a long line of these double doors at our school and the bastarding caretakers would lock different ones on different days!
ReplyDeleteHowever, on the flipside, there was a bench nearby that made watching people walking into doors a popular lunchtime activity...