Photo Feature

Everyone knows how stairs work. Place one foot on a step, shift your weight onto the leading foot and use the muscles in your leg to bring the rest of your body up the step. It is that simple. The other thing is that it's not a particularly hard thing to do; anyone but the most decrepit or stricken can handle stairs. Anyone who happens not to live in a bungalow (most of the population) has to deal with stairs on a daily basis. You could say we're conditioned to it. But show someone an escalator and a body can discombobulate and flummox. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people don't know what to do when faced with a moving staircase. Like a rabbit in the headlight glare or a cat taken by the nape of its neck, a paralysis takes over and people allow themselves to be carried as if ascending to a heaven. Neither motion nor emotion.

I get the fact that people might be tired, might have had a hard day and why not let the moving plane take the strain? And I'm not taking this stance to be belligerent, that's fine if you are genuinely tired. My worry is that, as a society, we are becoming conditioned to this behaviour and I don't think it bodes particularly well. Just because something moves does not mean that we have to be moved by it. There is no hoodoo. It's just a fucking staircase.