One of the organisational staff of the philosophy department here had a stroke (more or less) a few days ago. I’m glad to say she seems to be recovering ok, but at the time she couldn’t manage the stairs to get to the ambulance so they brought in a fire truck and took her out the window with a motorised ladder. I didn’t witness any of this, I was in my room on the floor above, but my officemates and I did curse at the drivers honking outside and close the window.

This is a daily event for us; the street outside has a large cafe and a swanky hotel on it, so there are often delivery vans offloading or taxis waiting, and usually there’s some twit who thinks things will move faster if they hang on the horn. Behind a taxi, I can kind of empathise with. Honking at a delivery van, while it’s clearly still being unloaded, starts to seem a little antisocial.

But some people I just can’t understand, no matter how hard I try. Sitting on the horn for minutes at a time, behind an ambulance and a fire truck, that are busy lifting an unconscious woman out of a second-story window?