There is a saying, one as old as some particularly old hills and wise as the wisdom teeth of an owl. A saying which has been handed down from generation to generation in order to be handed out, free of charge, when life has taken one of its trademark cruel turns and the recipient is filled with despair at another lost opportunity.
As one door closes, another one opens.
And yes, you’ve guessed it. Doors, and their operation, does indeed form the backbone of today’s post.
Getting A Handle On It
It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who read last week’s offering (which can be found here), that I’m not talking about lock-ins down at the local here. No, I gave the grand unlocking of the country’s pubs and hostelries a hard swerve and as indicated in said previous post, stayed in Me, My wife Tina, a film (the excellent Knives Out), and a few Jack daniels’.
There was, however, another unlocking, one which came a couple of days later.
To get to the much-anticipated point, the unlocking in question involved our own front door (which is actually on the side of the house, but meh, whatever). We were going out; you see. Not out-out, just a little trip to the local tip to dispose of some cardboard. It wasn’t the most exciting of excursions, but a little spice was added when I lifted the handle of the door prior to turning the key, heard a ‘clunk’, and felt a total loss of any resistance in the now dangling handle.
DIWhy?
It meant the door could not be locked and the car full of cardboard would have to remain in the driveway while myself and Tina made our way back into the house for a clueless examination of the door.
Now neither myself nor Tina are what you might call technically minded. Personally, I’d have trouble wiring a plug and usually resort to shouting at such things in the hope that may achieve something. Even as a child I was far more Lego than Meccano. So taking apart and rebuilding a door lock wasn’t something I was about to get into lightly, or if I’m honest, at all.
Tina, however, had no such concerns. Within minutes she’d located the screwdriver set I’m guessing someone once bought us and was busily detaching the handle from the door. To give her full credit, she managed this in what must have been record time, giving us access to the internal mechanism that shoots 5 bolts from door to jamb. It was at that point we realised we had no idea what we were looking at.
Achievement Unlocked!
It was at this point we put our frustration to one side and did what we should have done some twenty minutes earlier and phoned a locksmith. Actually, that’s a lie. We phoned two locksmiths. The first we tried seemed a little on the steep side and gave themselves an astonishingly large window of time to make an appearance which, as we had places to see and people to go, we took some objection to.
The second was both more reasonable and willing to treat us as an emergency case (Dropping the words ‘disabled’ and ‘vulnerable’ into the conversation works wonders. I know I’m a bad man). A smallish man with a toolbox and an air of quiet competence turned up less than an hour later, took one look at the door and explained we’d need a new lock, and new internal gubbins. The price for this would be £240 inc VAT.
In the end, we had no choice. Captain Competent got on with his quiet and competent work and less than 30 minutes later we were £240 poorer and a hell of a lot more secure. It meant we could leave the house and ‘pop’ to the aforementioned tip, although thanks to social distancing and a byzantine queuing system the ‘popping’ took over an hour. I may have said a naughty word.
So there you have it. There’s some kind of delicious ironic echo going on there somewhere in there, but in the week a fair portion of the country was celebrating coming out of lockdown we found ourselves unable to lock ourselves down if we tried. As the pub doors opened, another one failed to close.
Until next time…
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