Alright, I’m going to explain the next part from my point of view (being a heterosexual male). The next time you’re arranging to meet up with someone you are in love with, who incidentally wants nothing more than friendship from you, tell them “I want to take you out. Dinner and a movie. Just us.” Before she has a chance to tell you that she just wants to be friends, add the line, “…as friends” to the end of your sentence. Then go on to talk about where you’re going to meet up: “So, 7 o’clock at the station, etc.” Just as she agrees to the location and time, quickly (, quietly and subtly) finish the conversation with “Alright, it’s a date.” If you’re making the plans by phone, follow this up immediately with quot;Goodbye” and then hang up the phone. Now, if you’ve made it this far and have at least a pound of guts inside of you, you maggots, turn up to the “date” in something a little more formal. If you’re so brave, then I dare you… go in a tux. A tux with a rose in your mouth. It’s a crime to look this good. You smooth criminal.

I was at the train station in central London’s busy Piccadilly Circus, a station renowned for closing due to overcrowding at the least inspiring time of the evening. It was about 11:30ish and everyone had been kicked out of the bars and pubs as a consequence of the “Last orders pulease” bell that had been rung. After struggling to get through the ticket-gates, I had made it to the first set of escalators which would begin my descent into the bowels of London Underground Transport. It was getting hotter as I moved downwards, but doesn’t hot air rise upwards? If all the physics teachers I ever had were put in a microwave oven together, they’d certainly entertain the possibility of my hypothesis that sometimes hot air dips downwards. Anyway, as the thought of my ex-physics teachers turning in a circle on a metallic plate in a microwave oven danced around in my head, the place outside and around my head was getting warmer. I was on this escalator, moving downwards, to a place closer to hell. I turned to my trusty loyal droid beside me and muttered “Well Artoo, we’re not in Cloud City anymore.”

For those of you familiar with the train station I am rambling on about, you’ll know that you need to go down two sets of escalators to reach the train platform. Reaching the end of the first escalator, I made my way to the second one. Little did I know that before me would lie a challenge requiring the same level of skill as piloting a broken helicopter with one side of your body and completing game type B on the highest level of Tetris on the (fatal as a brick when thrown) old-school Game Boy. I’m sure there are a few of you shaken-Martini drinkers yelling “But what kinda feeble ‘ha-ha, hand me a blind-fold’ challenge could this be?” The challenge was to descend the second escalator, which was out-of-order! The only thing out of order here was the fact that people had to descend to the train platform by using this broken-down escalator. Why was this escalator broken? It looked intact. There was no gaping hole which would suggest that this escalator was actually a one-way express-ride to the devil’s toilet-seat. Perhaps a busker or street entertainer had decided to prolong his 30 seconds of exposure to the public eye and just pressed the “use only in an emergency, dumbass” stop-button for the escalator. Nevertheless, this trip would suck something awful. Under other circumstances I would have dared the other team, gotten double-dared, answered the question correctly and would have escaped taking this physical challenge. But this was no gameshow so my hopes of tagging my team-mate, so that she’d have to go into the Fun-house, went up in flames.

Maybe most of you have been fortunate to have never experienced this, but walking down a static escalator doesn’t agree with the portions of your brain responsible for orientation and balance. Each of the steps have what seems like hundreds of parallel grooves running all the way down and to add to that these steps are larger than your average step. Optical illusions can be fun things when they’re sitting on a page in front of a seated you. Optical illusions are definitely not welcomed when you’re trying to descend a steep staircase of grooved metal. Feeling a little vertigo, I continued my journey down these stationary escalator steps, under the watchful eyes of people ascending on the adjacent working escalator. The audience was watching and listening for anyone on this assault (on the senses) course to make a mistake. One wrong step and you’d get to the bottom of it, literally. Out-of-order escalators are as welcome as ironic rain on my wedding day, or something. That’s my rant for the day. Collect all 150 to be the ultimate rant-master. Gotta catch ‘em all!