Fairfield Hall happiness

I found myself on the Central Line yesterday, in my own happy world, trying to pretend I wasn’t on a highly-crowded tube. I was standing in the area where the seats are and suddenly became aware that someone was shoving me from behind, whilst angrily shouting “excuse me” as she sat down in the empty chair in front of me.

She was probably in her thirties. Very well dressed. She had some sort of accent, maybe Brazilian, with a tinge of American. She was carrying a nasty fluffy dog in a basket. She came across as entitled and spoilt, like someone who’d never really been challenged in life. She huffed and blew and shot a few evil looks in my direction.

The next thing I knew, she’d stood up again and was leaving the train. I heard her, yet again, saying “excuse me” really angrily. And then I was aware that she’d shoved a young Asian lad really hard in the back, to the extent that he’d fallen out of the train and onto the platform.

The lad suddenly started pointing at his ear and it became clear he was wearing a hearing aid. He was deaf and hadn’t actually heard the woman talking. Instead of instantly backing down and apologising profusely to the man she’d pushed, Little Miss Entitled just shouted more loudly and angrily. People on the tube were utterly aghast as the woman stormed off down the platform, still yelling. I hope the fluffy dog bit her. 

The deaf bloke was plainly really shaken. He got back into the carriage and made himself as small as possible, like a wounded animal. It was a really upsetting sight. I tapped his arm and asked if he was alright. He could plainly lip read because he nodded, looking anything but alright. “If it’s any consolation,” I said, “she was horrible to me as well. She’s obviously having a really bad day.”

And then I got thinking. Plainly she’d felt it was okay to push two men out of her way. Dishing out a bit of violence against two men is okay. They’re men: they must be bullies, they deserve it, and, besides, a woman can’t bully a man etc etc. But the fuss that would rightly have be made if I’d pushed a woman out of a tube carriage is not worth thinking about. Certainly someone would have chased me down the platform and given me a piece of their mind. In a world where we’re all searching for equality, we really need to learn that there shouldn’t be one rule for one gender and another for the other.

On a far more pleasant note, I was given a tour of the newly-refurbished Fairfield Halls in Croydon yesterday. It opens in September, and there’s plainly still a lot which needs to be done but it’s very exciting. I was provided with steel-capped boots, a hard hat, hi-viz and gloves which made me feel very masculine. Sadly I also had to wear a pair of enormous plastic goggles, like the things we used to don during science experiments, and suddenly I was a massive geek! 

What is absolutely clear is that the building is going to be sensational. Everything has been thought through so carefully. There are cafes, roof terraces, studio spaces, theatre spaces, and, of course, the famous concert hall which is known for its almost perfect acoustic. 

Designed by the same bloke who did the Royal Festival Hall, the Fairfield Halls opened in 1962. I was very pleased to hear that they’re stripping the building back to how it would have looked when it was first built: that fusion of space-age glamour and no-frills modern brutality. These buildings, as I recently learned on a trip to Coventry, are much better understood with the original signage, fonts, and, more crucially, those amazing coloured tiles: usually duck egg blues, crimsons and light purples. When you strip away the 1980s gaudy plastics, cheap melamine and wood-chip counters, everything suddenly makes perfect sense, and you find yourself looking at a style icon rather than a tatty, weatherworn disaster zone.