I had to go to SPA this morning, to retrieve a bag with some shopping in it that I had left there yesterday, and for the first tie ever the guard on the security gate needed a measure of persuasion to let me in. Normally, it is a mere formality to hand over a visitor’s badge on a lanyard, but today I was accompanied all the way to B block, across the bridge, and then back again.
It is interesting, to me at any rate, the way certain aspects of life in the various places I have lived and worked in over the past few years, tend to repeat themselves. The security set-up here most resembles that in Johannesburg, in both cases protecting a fenced and gated compound. Though the guys in South Africa would have been impressed with the huge, steel, sliding gate they have here, which seems able to repel a tank. Though, to be fair, they did have guns instead (unless the advertised 24 hour armed response was a fiction, like the “Beware of the dog” signs that some dogless homeowners put on their gate. Or – a memory dredged from the past – my dad having a fake burglar alarm, complete with flashing red light, attached to our house in Welwyn (cheaper and more easily installed).
Security in Ethiopia was a guy sitting in a plastic garden chair at the top of the stairs leading to the film school, while in Lesbos it was an entryphone on the door of the Gecko School (though generally the door was left unlocked.) Somewhat ironically, in view of current events, the only place with no security was in Lebanon, either at the school in the Beka’a valley (spiritual home to Hezbollah) or the hostel in Beirut, currently one of the most dangerous places on earth.
At SPA, the younger of the two regular security guards, the one who had escorted me today, is the one I struggle to get a smile out of. It is his older colleague who generally gives me the warmest welcome, “Welcome SPA!”, and presents me with my lanyard as though I were an Olympic medallist. But generally I get on well with them both, as I have done with their various counterparts, and for that matter with the various cleaners, canteen workers, maintenance men… treating them with a mixture of humour, politeness, and respect. Generally rare and unexpected, so far as I can tell.
