Seats of power: One lot always wants to limit the other

I had this client due in for a breakfast meeting the other day. A powerful and important woman, this client, albeit possessed of such physical fragility she looks like she eats a single rusk once a fortnight. She clearly needed building up, so I started to cook breakfast for her.

Ten minutes before she was due to arrive, the fire alarm went off. I opened every window in the building and flailed at the alarm with a folder. It continued to scream. I rang the number on the alarm box in the hall. It was answered with an impressive speed which did nothing to solve the problem. They don’t tell you, when they sell you the system, that if it goes off it will shriek at such volume that you will not be able to hear the alarm company guy who’s there to rescue you.

“TEXT ME” I yelled into the phone and — hands flattened against ears for protection — went to check if the building had any room in which the fire alarm was less aggressive. I found a uniformity of volume which meant no room was breakfast-safe. The guy texted me instructions on how to deploy a plastic key cleverly hidden in the most obvious place. I found it. It was broken. Somebody in our building had used it, broken it, and silently done a “Not me, Guv” by putting it back in its secret hideaway, maimed.

Maimed is only the beginning of what will happen to that person if I ever identify him or her. Standing in the hall with a useless fragment of plastic, my phone announced the arrival of another text, this one from my client, courteously bringing to my attention the fact that she was outside the front door. And had been for 10 minutes. This was worrying but helpful, because I’d never have heard the doorbell over the alarm. At the best of times, our corporate front doorbell has the decorous understatedness of the bell at the door of a convent.

I opened the door to find her looking at the building like you’d look at an untamed bomb, and in that moment, made one of those decisions that has got me where I am today, and please don’t ask where I am today, because I’m not that sure myself. I stepped out of the building, let the door close behind me, and instructed this woman (remember the powerful and important bit?) to take us to a coffee shop in her car. I suspect if I’d asked her to swim to Liverpool she’d have done it, no questions asked, in order to get away from the noise. It wasn’t until we were in the coffee shop that I realised I would have to stick her for the coffee, having neglected to take my wallet with me.

The other people working in the building were, I thought later, a bit humourless about the hospital pass I delivered unto them. Some of them were heard to say that it is a trainer’s worst nightmare to have 12 participants arriving for a course in the certain knowledge that they will not be able to hear themselves think, never mind present, until someone corks the alarm, which, in this instance, didn’t happen for an hour and a half.

The dying down of a deranged alarm offers an insight into sado-masochistic relationships. It’s so wonderful when it stops, you take a whole new pleasure in the normal. It even diminishes the desire to find and maim the key-breaker, nor to mention doing damage to the other moron who designed a tiny key made out of brittle plastic, thereby inviting breakage by the first moron.

We sat around in the newfound peace, discussing alarm systems. One of the guys said you didn’t need all this high-techery, that nothing beat broken glass embedded in the garden wall as a deterrent to the potential thief.

“Nonsense,” another said. “Throw a jumper on top of the broken glass and you’re in in a flash.”

We gazed on him with new admiration, never having thought of him as anything but ultra-respectable up to that point.

“When we were kids playing football, if the ball went into someone’s garden, you’d have to go over the wall and retrieve it,” he explained defensively, eager to retrieve his reputation. We told him we were impressed at his derring-do. We had not assumed he had been the kind of boy who would volunteer for such escapades.

“The rule was ‘kickers getters’,” he said sheepishly. Translated, this meant that whichever poor divil hat kicked the ball over the wall had to go to get it. It also meant that broken glass is ineffective as a deterrent, as well as being ugly as sin.

It is in that context that I wish to introduce you, Dear Reader, to the Kent Stud.

The Kent Stud is an internationally-recognised minor work of art, currently on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and manufactured by Kent Stainless, a drainage manufacturer in Ardcavan, Co Wexford. The Kent Stud is roughly 7.5cm tall and has the shape of a homemade ice-pop. It is heavy to heft, has that soft matt sheen that bespeaks eons of factory-polishing and has durability written all over it. A thing of beauty and a joy, forever. Or maybe a thing of beauty and a deterrent forever. Not that the stud could keep burglars or ball-retrievers out, but it will, according to the firm’s website, “deter people from unwanted sitting areas such as windowsills and wall tops”.

I would have thought that if you were slim enough to sit on a windowsill, good luck to you, given the appalling lack of sit-down places in most of our cities, but apparently many businesses have a rooted objection to strangers sitting on their sills, taking the view that you never know where they’ve been. Or perhaps adopting the stance that windowsill-sitters steal the light from those inside the window involved. And to give the manufacturers their due, they do make street furniture for the specific purpose of inviting casual sitters. They have the whole urban sitting market under control. They will poke their stud at you to prevent you sitting where residents/owners don’t want you to sit, thereby directing you to one of the benches where everybody would be just charmed if you’d sit.

Those who do not approve of this miracle of craftsmanship call it “the anti homeless spike” and that’s where the V&A come in. Its exhibition featuring the Kent Stud is all about showing how design reflects “how we live together today”. How we live today is pretty much how we’ve always lived together: One lot wanting to limit the lives of the other lot. At least the aesthetics are improving. The Kent Stud may be related to the glass-topped wall, but in design terms, it’s streets ahead.