Non-stop to the top

In addition to the infamous paternoster lift, there are two ‘normal’ elevators in the University of Sheffield Arts Tower. On and off, I’ve spent a significant proportion of the last six years in the Arts Tower, and a not inconsiderable period of that time has been spent either waiting for or travelling in these lifts. The tower was probably never designed to accommodate the number of people that use it today. It probably was designed to accommodate that number of people, but just not in the way that we use it. Hundreds, if not thousands of students, teaching staff and support staff come and go every day, travelling between floors as part of their daily routine. If you manage to get into a lift around the beginning of any busy hour in the Arts Tower, a trip up to the top can take five minutes or more, as you stop every second level and as the closing doors do their usual dance with the phantom people that step between them and hold it up.

As a long time occupant of the building, I have begun to work with the rhythms of the elevators. When the paternoster lift is broken (as it has been this week), waiting for up to four minutes for the normal elevators is normal and six to eight minutes is tolerable. anything longer than that doesn’t really matter because I will have already headed to the stairwells.

Sometimes though, such as when I’ve been working late, I do get to enjoy the Arts Tower’s elevators at their most responsive. The paternoster is always shut down some time between 19h and 20h (with a couple of warnings barked through the intercom by the security personnel to make sure that no-one is stuck in it overnight). During the day time, the two ‘normal’ lifts are in constant service: always on their way up or down. After about 19h though, they come to a rest. Quite logically, one will automatically return to ground level, and another will automatically wait on the tenth floor, so that no-one has to wait too long if you call a lift.

Inside the lift, everything is pretty much as you would expect. There are shiny doors, a big panel of buttons for ‘LG’, ‘G,’ ‘M’ and then ‘1′ through to ‘18′ (one lift continues to the nineteenth floor). But beneath all these is another button.

This button is marked ‘NS’.

There is no floor ‘NS’ and there is no apparent function of this button. But believing in academic urban legends, I’m prepared to put my faith in a story someone once told me. And that’s if you get into the lift on your own, and select just one floor, holding down the ‘NS’ button for the duration of your journey will mean that the lift ignores any requests from other floors to stop. ‘NS’ is said to stand for ‘Non-Stop’.

I don’t press ‘NS’ very often, partially out of respect for my fellow users of the Arts Tower, but partly because I want very much to believe that it’s true. I last pressed and held down the ‘NS’ button on Thursday night. And I can tell that - as always - it still seems to work.

The £125 train ticket

We went to London yesterday, but no, we didn’t pay £125. This is a ticket I found discarded by a previous passenger on the train. Instead of forking out £125, we instead chose a ‘Saver Return’ ticket, costing a much more reasonable £36.50 with a railcard. It’s a bit more than the £1 coach tickets we normally book well in advance, but then the train does take two hours less, is a lot more comfortable, and (most importantly) you can get free tea and coffee from the bar.

Heading off on a whim, we were able to escape to the capital last night for fine dining, fine drinking and fine discussions with certain close friends.

So much has happened in the last week, and yet there is so little to say. I (and we) are well and managing with the changes that the last seven days have thrown at us. Sorry for not telling you more, but that really is all I want to say right now.

It’s been a long weekend

There’s an unwritten and inverse rule of blogging that states that the more there is going on in my life, the less inclined I am to write about it. This blog is at its most fruitful, productive and coherent when there’s nothing to say. So I won’t begin to tell you about the last few days, but I’ll show you the horoscopes we found in a Sunday paper, left on a train that Bea and I rode on Sunday. Hers is on the left, mine is on the right.

Clouds scud

I love the verb ‘to scud’, as in the clouds were scudding by. Right now, the clouds are indeed scudding by, but I’m not sure if anyone here on the seventeenth floor of the Arts Tower has noticed because of the noise. The not only strong enough to send clouds scudding, it’s also strong enough to lift every window in their frames and rattle them violently against the building. A porter in this building once told me he had been on duty here during the night of the terrifying 1987 storm. He described me the sound of the entire exterior of the building shaking and crashing as winds slammed into it. He said that was the only night he had ever been afraid that this miniature sixties concrete skyscraper might come crashing down. Even now, the building’s steel and glass skin is shaking, lifting and contracting. No architecture should be fixed and unmoving: this movement reminds me how high above the ground we are and just how windy it is outside.

Sitting in the ninety-fifth floor lounge bar of the Hancock Tower in Chicago last week, I battled with my vertigo to approach the edge of the room and the floor to ceiling triple glazed windows. Knowing that the glass was super-reinforced did not help (my fingers are slipping over the keyboard with sweat as I recall this). To the south, a cluster of competing skyscrapers all demanded a piece of the sky, and it was to that side of the room that most people were automatically drawn when they entered the bar. For me, however, it was the sprawling illuminated grid of the suburbs to the west and north that caught my attention. Looking off to the middle and far distance was far more palatable to my veritiginous eyes.

It was funny how an irrational fear of heights can affect me. I knew full well that those windows ninety-five floors above ground level were safe, but I was still petrified because it was new and unexperienced, and it was so silent that the view could not be comprehended as an actual urban panorama. Sitting here, the (opening) windows can shift and rattle all over the place, and I’m not in the slightest bit bothered. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been in and out of this building for almost six years now. Or perhaps knowing that the outside world is real (and bashing this building all about) is perversely making me less nervous?

Lost luggage

Last Sunday, at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. 

“Paging passenger Brown, paging passenger Brown, could you please meet an airline representative at the end of the airbridge…”

United Airlines flight 1106 had just taxied up to terminal two. The usual post-arrival scrum was in process, as everyone on the plane stood up in unison and waited expectantly to be able to get off the plane. Perhaps it was because we were ninety minutes late, or perhaps (more probably) because the hideous eighties fabric on the seats was beginning to make us all nauseous.

I however, had been paged. This has never happened to me before. After dozens of short hops on Ryanair, Easyjet and FlyBe, the idea of an airline taking care of me, let alone acknowledging my existence, was quite a special feeling. I managed to extricate myself from the delightful grey, orange and red interior of the tired Boeing, and there was indeed an Air Canada employee waiting for me at the foot of the airbridge. She was waiting to break the news to me: I would miss my connection to London Heathrow, but I had been re-booked onto a later flight. My delay in Chicago had actually been a good thing: had I flown home through Montreal as expected, I wouldn’t have had the security of a later trans-Atlantic flight home.

So I took my time through terminal two, not rushing like some passengers who still held onto the chance of making their next plane. I breezed through immigration (another stamp for the passport) and then through the door marked ‘Connections’. An interminably long corridor followed, another security check and then a short bus ride along taxiways and past dormant jet liners to the sparkling new terminal one. Through some glass doors, up an escalator and into the terminal. And there to greet me is a big display screen… and my original flight is still boarding. The calm air that has carried me this far evaporates. Perhaps I can still make it, after all I still have the original boarding card…

A quick check at an information desk (hallejulah, an airport departure lounge with information desks, not just shops…) and I realise I can still board the original 18h10 flight to London. Now the panic sets in, and I start pegging it down the long aisles of the new terminal. The London gate is, of course, the furthest away… en route my carrier bag splits at the handle, and I very nearly shower books and clothes across the marble floor. But with the determination of a hardened traveller, I continue to run.

And I make it. At 18h30, we push back, and so begins the long slog across Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and finally the vast Atlantic. With an astonishing tail wind, not only do we make up time, but we actually arrive over a sleepy London early - forcing us to perform tight circles over the Thames Valley until Heathrow’s curfew opens up at six in the morning. We touch down in darkness; one of the first planes to be allowed into one of the world’s busiest airports that morning.

I begin my journey north, but at a much slower pace. Although if the Piccadilly line tube to St. Pancras and the wretched Midland Mainline train to Sheffield seemed slow, I was to to be surprised once more. My checked luggage didn’t make it onto my earlier connection, instead making the later flight out of Toronto to Heathrow. A courier was kind enough to come to Sheffield on Monday evening with my bag, or so I thought, until I came home and realised it wasn’t my bag. Strange how I told them it was a blue and black rucksack, that it had come from Chicago and that it had my name on a BMI Diamond Club tag on it, and they managed to send me a grey roller suitcase from Vancouver with the name and address of a woman in Scotland on it. While I waited for the courier to return to collect the wrong bag, I did what no-one at Air Canada had evidently done, and called my unknown fellow passenger to let her know that her bag was at least in the right country.

It’s now Wednesday, and my bag still hasn’t shown up.