found myself at the back of a large crowd of people who had gathered at the foot of an escalator that stretched from the bowels of the London tube system to the expansive universe beyond. I remember thinking someone must have collapsed and that everyone was waiting vigilantly for the paramedics to come. But it soon became clear that the emergency was nothing more serious than a broken-down escalator which had transformed the moving metal steps before the swelling crowd into what was once widely understood to be a set of stairs. If it hadn’t been for someone in the middle of the crowd shouting,
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