WHAT I want to avoid in this life is yet another escalator incident.
We don’t have a lot of escalators in Fiji, fortunately, although the number is growing.
The first that I recall was installed in the Harifam Building in Suva and was a “must do” on the school holiday list of every child with access to some bus fare.
Droves of them would queue up to ride to the first floor and then ride the down escalator straight back to the ground floor to queue again.
Oh, the thrill of it all. The chaos when some child decided to run up the down escalator; the tedium of the parent waiting to prise the child away before she managed to get back on the up escalator; the crossness of legitimate customers trying to get to the first floor; the terror when somebody tripped or tried to slide down the middle bit.
Due to some First World experience, I liked to think I am an old hand at escalating.
I certainly like them better than elevators, in which you end up cheek by sweaty jowl with perfect strangers or closely intimate with weird people who tread on your foot and poke you in the back with their bags.
Children especially suffer in elevators. People don’t see them, they are too busy looking to press the right button for their floor or squeeze to the front to get out.
Then when they do get out they discover their little Joni has disappeared behind 15 pairs of legs and given up hope of ever seeing home and mother again.
I’ll do anything except take the stairs, however, so my preferred means of getting from here to up there is to ride on escalators.
By escalators I mean those that rise one floor level at a time. I almost had a profound mental collapse when I found myself happily following family members on to the stairway to heaven at the Martin Place railway station in Sydney.
This escalator rose from the bowels of the earth in one horrifyingly dizzy flight of silver steps that zipped along at an equally dizzying pace.
I gripped the moving handrail while waiting for the nausea to pass, until I realised my hand was now passing the point of no return and I was about to plunge forward into the back of the knees of the person in front unless I let go.
I clutched my chest instead and spent some agonisingly long moments wobbling about on my assigned step and panting pathetically.
To prevent me from being paralysed with terror when we reached the top, some kind person gave me a good shove from behind that sent me reeling into a tiled space that probably doubled as a morgue for people who didn’t make it to the end of the escalator.
It took me some time and a little sit down to recover, but after that the morning went quite well.
It was, after all, the culmination of many years of supporting, encouraging, financing, checking assignments on topics I knew nothing about, fielding lengthy and expensive phone calls about dreadful tutors and worse exams, consoling on the award of a grade that should surely have been an A+, giving assurance that life can go on and generally doing parental duty to get our youngest daughter, the one known as Cuddles the Thug, to the successful end of her studies.
Then came my moment to smile proudly as impressively gowned and bewigged persons summoned Cuddles to be admitted to the Bar — with all the pomp and splendour and some of that sly humour lawyers have.
It was all most wonderful, especially when her cousin, another young woman lawyer, moved her to the Chief Justice.
Many pictures later, some of which were photo bombed by her niece Tufaan Taylor, the hurricane of Flagstaff and never one to be left out of any sort of celebration or event, we dragged ourselves away from the court.
We got picked up and set out to celebrate, with a slight detour to the local shopping mall for a couple of bottles of bubbly and disgustingly fattening food.
Yet again, the escalator entered my life in the guise of a benign moving slope that gripped shopping trollies and delivered you and it safely to the parking area.
We almost made it. Somehow the trolley wheel got jammed at the top, Tufaan almost pitched out but was grabbed by her aunt who let go her mobile phone that got stuck in the escalator, while I tried to fall over but was stopped by the large man behind me.
Somehow he managed to keep me upright, prevent the people behind from trampling us all underfoot, retrieve the phone and push trolley, child and new lawyer out of the way.
When I stopped the screaming, I suggested tartly to the lawyer that her first job could be a pro bono case for her mum to claim damages to her dignity from the mall and escalator manufacturers.
She advised me, pro bono, not to be so silly, that I was a First World misfit and should go home and stay off escalators.
For a novice legal expert, I have to admit it was probably sound advice.
* Seona Smiles is a regular contributor to this newspaper.
