Ranting

Here are some overdue rants, which I was seething madly over on Friday, without the internet access necessary to inflict them on anyone else.

1. The ferry gangway is wide enough for two people if they both tuck themselves in fairly close to the side. However, if someone walks slap-bang in the middle of the gangway, nobody can get past them. Why is it that very slow walkers invariably do this? They usually shoulder their way to near the front of the queue, so they can ensure that they delay the maximum number of people. An enormous gap opens up in front of them, so they must know that they're walking much slower than everyone else, but still they plod along, while hundreds of seething commuters are banked up behind them like water behind a dam. Grr! Rant! Rant! Rant!

2. How can anyone actually enjoy shopping? I had to visit John Lewis in the big shopping arcade in Southampton. The arcade is a sea of noise and blundering crowds, who cut in front of you, and stop at the top of escalators to dither, and meander around oblivious to their surroundings. Outside the arcade there is currently a market with children's fairground rides, all blaring out loud conflicting music. To get into John Lewis, you have to brave the hideous stench of a million perfumes. The whole place is set up like a labyrinth to try to trick you, and there isn't even a nice simple Coats department, but about a hundred million separate places where coats lurk, most of them colonised by inconsiderate browsers who have surrounded themselves with an enormous pool of shopping bags, and make no attempt to shift to the side to allow someone else to browse beside them. I am normally quite willing to accept that other people might love things that I detest, like raw carrots, but a busy shopping centre is so beyond enjoyable to me that I really can't comprehend how anyone might derive pleasure from being there.

Fire

As we were leaving our hotel room on Sunday morning, the fire alarm started to sound, and a recorded voice kept repeating that fire had been reported in the building, and we should leave by the nearest exit. We were leaving anyway, but instead of going to Reception to check out, went down the stairs (avoiding the lift, as the fire instructions advised) and out into the street. A couple of dozen other people did the same, and we milled for a minute or two until a staff member came out and told us it was a false alarm and we could go back in again. While Pellinor went to put our luggage in the car, I went back upstairs to the reception desk right next to the restaurant on the second floor, and found that there were hundreds of hotel guests still eating breakfast, lounging round on couches and in general making it clear that they had never had any intention of obeying the order to evacuate.

It's just as well it really was a false alarm, really. I wonder how many people have died because everyone generally assumes that any alarm is a false alarm.