HI-RISE WI-FI

To be sure, when living in a block of flats, one becomes very quickly aware of the porous nature of concrete and the tunnelling capacity of sound. When I inhabited a communist squat block in Warsaw, it wasn’t just sound that travelled. You could tell you were knee-deep in a Warsaw winter by the smell of the national stew ‘bigos’ wafting up from below, that cabbagey-sausagey smell unmistakeable. Shared sounds and smells were an intrinsic part of the experience of living in a communist-built block. This was accompanied by a strange sense of community, to the point where after 3 years I had seamlessly synchronised myself (at least temporally) into my neighbours lives.

When living in Rabat in Morocco the concrete was so perforated (facilitating ventilation in the hot summers) that I couldn’t just hear the troll below me and her afternoons of satellite TV but the guy below her too battering away at all hours of the night. This sinister soundtrack was compounded by the Arabic adage ‘do as your neighbours do, or leave’.

Here, in Glasgow high-rises, the insulation is a little bit better, and the summers a little bit cooler. Sounds are more muffled, if they are at all. Smells are more or less, with the exception of a tobacco-ed elevator, non-exsitent. But there is, thankfully, something that does travel through these thick demarcating walls - and which is more welcome than all the others put together - the wireless waves of broadband. Whence exactly it comes I am not entirely sure, but it comes. Living within a frequential stone’s throw of some 130 apartments has its advantages. Gone is the 30 quid a month direct debit, and the dodgy service that invariably accompanies it. Here, on the seventeenth floor, I simply open up my laptop and off we go. Bloody marvellous! Hi-rise wi-fi. Just how it should be.