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The Blessings and Pitfalls of Colossal Gatherings.
Harry Newton • Jun 18, 2019
So for those of you who may not use the word ‘Colossal’ on a regular basis, with my wheelchair being just over 4ft in height and the ‘mechanical beast’ weighting in at a mere 140kg, traipsing around busy music & beer festivals, stadiums, tents and conference centres can be moderately problematic at times. So the Ancient Greek’s described ‘Colossal’ as being ‘gigantic in size’, which in my world, some of these busy events that I attend are ‘Colossal Gatherings’ which is a seemingly apt description. Regularly, because of my perceptual difficulties in a busy crowd, the score card generally goes in my favour, as I roll over plenty of size 10’s, with the odd “ouch, oh sorry mate I didn’t see you there”.
Which if you think about it my wheelchair equates to the approximate weight of an African Wildebeest, so rolling over Size 10’s tends to hurt, but after numerous ‘Excuse me please, excuse me, ‘cuse me, or any other dialogue I wish to choose, remaining warm as a radiator sometimes tends to be disregarded as a mildly hot headed Yorkshireman. If this was a boxing Heavyweight contest, the man in the middle would unanimously have brought the agony to a close long before Round 12. However, there’s no merit for sportsmanship here and so the cookie continues to crumble.
The Gladiatorial Experience
Gladiators are you ready…. Wildebeest are you ready??? “Contender you will go on my first whistle…. Gladiator you will go on my second whistle”. This scenario is often played out like the 1990’s version of Gladiators, except with no safety equipment and is often my feeling when you are passing lines upon lines of indignantly irate sports and music fans. So there’s some science for you, a study by University College London has found that people will wait for an average of 6 minutes in a queue before giving up in frustration. The report also revealed that a 6” radius is the minimum amount of personal space that needs to be given to a person in a queue, to avoid increasing stress or anxiety.
So with these monumental queues and constant invasion of personal space less than 6”, which the science says we don’t like, tends to breed a cocktail mixture of an anxious, stressed, frustrated, bladder bursting and beer parched crowd. Us wheelchair users are allowed to use a designated disabled queue consequently, passing the able bodied rammed queues, which in keeping with the Greek mythology theme, sadly opens the ‘Pandoras Box’ of sneers and jeers from the very impatient crowd. However, this is a harsh reality for many of us wheelchair users as the perception of this makes some people feel like we are queue jumping and cheating! “What? Cheating? Are you for real? Are you having a laugh? Have you seen what glides me around each day? Try getting the Wildebeest’ on the tube, not such an eloquent ballerina after all”. May I add, that not all people are like this towards us however, you can’t help the way you are made to feel and sadly the bad outweighs the good in this case. As a result, one may feel inferior nonetheless to me just being at these “Colossal Gatherings’ is a blessing in itself and one of life’s great memory making experiences and I continue to know that my faith in humanity is alive and kicking and the science may just be right, we all have off days right?
Following on from the queue experience I enter Twickenham stadium, which to me can only be best described a Gladiatorial Arena with at full capacity of over 82,000 super fans, disabled and able bodied, who are chanting, singing and laughing as we are all there for one common purpose. For the first time, I feel contented and the match allows us to not be so separate and come together and unite with the same goal which is just to support and have fun! The negativity of the previous queue and crowd logistics becomes a dim and distant memory, as I hum to myself the great Beatles song “yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far way”. In this instance, England won! I was one very content Englishman!