Think with your bottom. Especially in public spaces.
Any wonder Romeo & Juliet’s love was thwarted? The couple had looked high and low for a seat they could cosy up on – to no avail, because the devoted duo had wandered into Singapore’s green and pleasant land only to find, fail to find rather, comfortable seating.
You think: surely, I jest?
I am a public person. I walk the streets, I take buses, I cross parks, I rush along train station platforms, I wander in malls, I stroll in the heartlands.
And exactly when I require a brief respite, there is none to be had. You simply cannot have one. It has been determined by an ill concept.
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Public seating is offensive. I know the official term is hostile, but these seats truly do offend – as in, off-end, given that they’re designed to make your rear end slide off, your bag of groceries tip, your arm rest at kama sutra angles.
They are curved at bus stops, narrow on platforms, modest in void decks, with wicked bars across an already short bench so you cannot possibly attempt a sprawl across it.
An uncivil civilisation. One that starts and ends on the premise: We cannot have people think we are a lazy lot, given to lying on park benches, lazing about on station platforms, and shaking legs in a mall.
Hello, policy architects! Anywhere else on planet earth, if anyone, someone, wants to snooze in a public park, they do, because it’s a park, geddit?
Who creates our seating arrangements in the public place with the sole intention of putting folk through hoops?
It’s a bit late for me to qualify for neighbourhood hurdles and obstacle races, you know?
Have you noticed how some chairs and benches are configured in corners of a kampung? Diagonally, so residents have to make themselves heard. Mean-spirited, don’t you think, when elders can already be hard of hearing…
Why make bus stop seats so troublesome? It’s not like all of us are waiting for all the buses to come, all at the same time!
The few places you can park your bum on along the train platforms are at the far ends. That’s right, make the old and frail and tired walk the extra distance, why don’t you? The further from the escalator, the better. Fool, who made you my fitness instructor?
Yes, yes, oh scholarly one, you crafted it with urban design in mind. Try burden design instead – you’ll have to put on your thinking pants for that one.
Oh, evil one, perhaps your single mall seat’s part of the treasure hunt. Force shoppers and ‘mall-ians’ to seek hither and thither for a chair to rest in, and in the doing, they’d have covered all floors, your target plan all along?
I’d seen circular seating one time in the city (believe it’s gone now) and it was that sight that prompted my Romeo & Juliet narrative.
I could not see how any couple or family or few friends could sit (it was along Stamford Road) and chat with each other – never mind hold hands. Well, unless someone starts the music, and we all have a go at passing-the-parcel here.
Guys, give people a break, man.
All in a day’s work is when one needs to plant our weary bod on a seat, on a bench or against a lean-to. Isn’t it the least that design can do — allow for some form of ease and comfort, no?
Changi International Airport is way far to go, just so I can sit comfortably for a bit.
Without being too much of a Grinch so close to Christmas, there are viable alternatives to my rant on the prevalent discomfort of public seating.
You can always BYO (bring your own) seating apparatus. Choose the most lightweight and compact model of adjustable, foldable, portable chairs to guarantee your own wellness support.
Indulge in a hunt in the malls, first to find a spot where you can place your weary bod, and, since you are then well-ensconced, you have to be the “baggage handler” (the one to hold on to all the shopping).
Be warned you may fall upon large, coloured shapes which you figure are chairs in disguise. You are not wrong. But they have not been purposed for seniors, unless you are in your second childhood.
When all’s said and done, best get together with your fellow SilverStreakers in a food court or hawker centre or coffeeshop and have a nice cuppa conversation, comfortably.
