The Fantastic Door

Frustration abounds today.

I had meant to bring you 'My Favourite Door', in the sense that it's the door that, although of very little other interest, has brought me the most pleasure of recent times. It opens to an Edwardian house and details, in what may very well be homemade stained-glass, what appears to be a huge cock bursting out of a rippling ocean. It never fails to brighten the day. Sometimes I make a special detour to see it.

But it's cursed, the donger-door. Several attempts have been made to photograph it, all ending with various defects of shade or focus, and today I got distracted by the door above, snapped it, and then was told by my camera to charge its failing batteries just as the light became perfect, and I narrowed in on the subject and it stopped looking like the lighthouse it was supposed to be and became what it was and is and will always be. A big, rising cock.

My grandfather was fascinated, in an amateur fashion, by the relationship between the penis and English architecture. He literally could not pass a church without meandering on in some detail about "great stone phalluses spurting skywards to God". Preferring, as did the rest of the family, the more uteral pleasure of the synagogue (warm dark room, limited scope for movement, meaningless background hum, free refreshments), he made a less-than-ideal travelling companion around the Renaissance towns of Italy where, as he pointed out to the locals, they hedged their bets by offering both the cock *and* the teat.

Anyway, he would be delighted to see the mezuzzah on the right-hand side of the photographed door, believing that world geography comprised only three distinct regions: a small part where there were Too Many Jews (Crown Heights, Stamford Hill, Israel), a vast swathe of Not Enough Jews (Idaho, West London, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine), and a minuscule area where it was 'just right' (Upper West Side, Hampstead, His Flat).

A couple of generations later, I still feel considerably safer, perhaps through sense-memory, in areas where I can see a few mezuzzahs on the doorframes, particularly next to a door like this one. In a row of solid 1840s semi-detached villas, this is an unimpeachably restored door. It's the sort of anthropomorphic door that would come to life in a Marvel comic and save the metropolis with its solid righteousness, catching villains in the web of its fanlight, before being written out because it's too difficult to draw.

The cheeks of the door, in contrast to the symmetry of everything else, are a random patchwork of yellow, red, orange and two shades of blue, but this designless feature among the order serves only to improve the overall effect.

I can't even begin to think how much a door like this would cost, but the scratched R-reg Peugeot outside the house suggests sacrifices have been made and domestic priorities are in the right place. I would, however, be tempted to turn the letterbox into a smiley mouth.

[Hello chumster! Thanks for the write-up...particularly the bit about pointless shite, which might be the idea. In his diaries, Alan Bennett (whose door I might photograph at some point) arrived home from a trip to find his dustbin contained several turds which had dissolved in the rain to make a kind of shit soup. On slopping it out, he made an etymological distinction: shit is the self-contained shapes, shite is what's smeared round the edges of the bin. So thank you, I think.]