Going Underground

www.paulcoia.com

New York is in a mess. The city is going bust and those goddesses of the Big Apple, the Wall Street wives, have had to start an online blog asking for tips on how to cook and clean now that their husbands have lost their jobs. Their servants, like the Swarovski encrusted nail extensions, are a thing of the past and, where greed was good, surviving is now better.

The fur coat and silk knicker brigade are having to adapt to their downmarket move to the suburbs. They may even, God forbid, have to travel on public transport which they must have assumed in the past was only for the disabled and criminal fraternity. The fragrant ladies will be carrying their soya café lattes underground to catch the subway and, horror of horrors, will have to plonk last season’s Dolce and Gabbana on a grubby seat that may be more used to charity shop jeans.

But these ladies who have lost their Saks appeal won’t be picking up the subway train in a brand new station, as you may have seen in the story from New York this week. In case you missed it, the first underground rail station to be built in the Big Apple for over twenty years opened on Tuesday at South Ferry following many years of development and a spend of over five hundred million dollars. But no one is allowed to use it.

It turns out that the designers, architects and engineers built the platforms too far from the trains, meaning a virtual bungee jump from the concourse to reach the carriage. The Health and Safety police took seconds to declare it unfit for purpose under the Americans With Disabilities Act and it currently sits, days after the opening, alone and unloved.

I think the reason I love this story so much, apart from the thought of the Banking Beauties losing their Jimmy Choos down the gap between the platforms, is that I can see myself as the designer, foreman and workman, all of whom should have spotted the potential problem and fixed it, but were about as useful as a lap dancer in a mosque.

Like these tradesmen I’ve learned over the years that when I get involved in building anything, despite my best endeavours, it will end up looking like broomstick debris after Dorothy’s house has fallen from the typhoon.

I first discovered my lack of design talent many years ago at school when I decided that what my bedroom wall needed was a calendar to accommodate my bursting diary full of homework, piano lessons and reminders of Blue Peter competition deadlines. Not yet having any pocket money I decided to make one myself. After all, how difficult could it be? With all the planning and forethought of spontaneous applause, I set to.

I folded a cardboard box end in half and stapled it at the sides, and then came to the tough part. I should, of course, have mixed and matched months, days and dates making up twelve months, thirty one dates and seven days. A total of fifty bits of paper. But I wasn’t clever enough to see the easy way out. I decided to do one piece for every day of the year - that’s three hundred and sixty five bits of paper with writing on. Thank God it wasn’t a leap year.

Apart from the fact it took me weeks to do it, slowed as I was by several clouts around the ear for wasting my mum’s good Basildon Bond writing paper, the sheaf of paper became so thick that it wouldn’t fit inside the cardboard envelope now tacked expectantly on my wall. Like the New York station, on a slightly smaller scale, it was not fit for purpose.

My next “make” was an Aston Martin James Bond car. I couldn’t afford the official Airfix model with the bullet proof screen and tyre shredders, so I made my own by cutting the sides and roof from a shirt box and sticking a spring from my Little Physics Lab under a folded, L shaped, cardboard seat. I forced the seat down, glued the roof on and only then realised that the seat couldn’t pop up and eject any loitering baddie as the roof didn’t have an opening. So I cut a hole and, sure enough, the spring was activated with the seat popping straight out in to my face, leaving me with a pirate’s patch and watery eyes for a week or two.

I tried making my own clothes, tie dyeing T shirts that ended up looking exactly the same as before. I widened the leg of my jeans and looked like an effeminate sailor from some Tintin story, and I even sewed patches on my brand new Sunday jacket and was grounded, only being allowed out by my mum to get married. You can see why I’m now sponsored by Armani. They pay me not to wear their clothes.

This chaotic approach to making things followed me in to adult life. I’m good with flat pack furniture from Ikea, which is simply a time consuming, but logical, jigsaw but when asked to start from scratch and make it up as I go along, the word that sums up my efforts is “laughable”. I‘ve come to realise that some people are made to create beautiful things and others, like myself and New York’s engineering fraternity, are life’s botchers.

So, a word of advice to Manhattan’s elite designers and transport chiefs. Next time you want a new station, just save a lot of heartache and buy it flat packed. I’ll even fly over with my screwdriver to help.