Bottlenecks

Now that I'm old I'm slower. I don't worry so much about getting there, about saving time. I've come to think that a couple of minutes isn't really going to make much difference in the scheme of things - at least most of the time. It hasn't always been like that. I remember speeding down the A14 heading for a meeting, when I still worked in the UK, and suddenly wondering why I was risking my neck, and my licence, to be on time for yet another completely superfluous meeting. So, when I'm driving through Pinoso, I don't usually mind, or get flustered, when the car in front stops to let the passenger out or even when the car stops for nothing more essential than to have a chat with a passing neighbour. In fact I quite like it, a sort of Archer's like everyday tale of country folk. Over the years I've even grown accustomed to the person at the supermarket checkout first having a bit of a chinwag with the cashier and only then starting to pack away their products before the sudden realisation dawns that they might have to pay for their goods which leads to a frenzied, yet apparently fruitless for minutes, hunt for their purse/wallet.

This laissez faire approach does not extend to people who decide to have their conversation in the middle of the entranceway to the supermarket or the health centre. It does not extend to the people who stop on the stairs, as they leave the theatre, to comment on the Madrid Barça game. It does not extend  to the couple who decide to greet their next door neighbour, who they haven't seen for the past hour or so, whilst standing on a pavement hemmed in by a wall on one side and a safety barrier on the other so that everybody else has to ask to pass. There seems to me to be a substantive difference and this sort of incivility makes me cross. With just a little thought for the rest of humankind the group could walk two metres further and avoid causing a bottleneck; to leave the door clear or path clear. I'd like it too if, first, they realised that I was keeping the door open for them, instead of suddenly slowing to a snail's pace, and, second, if they said thanks for my small but generous gesture. Even though I consider it from time to time I still can't bring myself to let the door swing to in their ungrateful faces.

Now I thought this was my Britishness coming through. Hurry, hurry, hurry. After all I saw one of my island brethren (it was a man) beeping at someone crossing, with their trolley, outside the Tesco's in Huntingdon. So far as I can tell their misdemeanour was that they were not walking fast enough. All I could think was that it was maybe a barrister doing the honking and who thought that those 20 seconds were worth a wad of cash. But today, with no idea what to write about for this week's post, I was reading a Spanish novel, when I came across this passage - well the original was in Castilian so this is a loose translation.

"I suppose that we are all irritated by irresponsible people who wander around or go very slowly or who even stop without warning or who occupy the whole width of the pavement or who form groups so that it's impossible to overtake them. Even old and "lame" people irritate us too. Like you, like all of us, I have had to contain the impulse to give them a kick in the arse so they get a move on, or even to stick my little pocket knife in their fat buttocks, not only because they are a pain in the neck but also because of a morbid impulse, the same impulse we all have, from time to time, to destroy something pretty and valuable or to throw ourselves from a great height." - you get the idea, especially from the last phrase, that the man in the book is a bit off his head, but even the maddest have lucid moments. It goes on. "Well, one day, talking about this to a good friend I thought it would be a good idea to invent a horn for pedestrians. Perhaps as an application on our mobile phones with various sounds and noises to be used as a substitute for "excuse me?", "do you mind?" and "could I get past, please?".

I'm expecting the novel's hero will soon have a rant about the door opening scenario too!