And we begin.
I've long had the daydream idea of producing a large, glossy hardback detailing a social and pictorial history of front doors, inspired largely by the fact that one of S.'s friends somehow managed to finagle a five-figure research grant from a German university for a Ph.D. on door-entry systems. If the buttons on the sides are worth the big Euros, then how much for the doors themselves?
Very little, I'd wager. Perhaps the price of a few copies at Zwemmers bookshop, which has closed down anyway, no doubt because it was usually window-displaying coffee-table books about doors.
As I'm not blessed with the skills required to dupe continental academia out of fantastic sums (I imagine the man must have gone in there like something from a Marx Brothers film: cheque and pen in hand, broken briefcase scattering papers, fast-talking the Dean into signing while apes and peacocks whirled around the room and his brother propositioned a dancing-girl with a horn and a kazoo) the idea is surfacing here. We'll have a door at the top of each post. I'll talk about the door and its history and what it represents. I may wander a little.
The doors above, which I like a lot, are at an estimate from 1900. The houses they're attached to are relatively late additions to a Victorian neighbourhood where, going up the hill, you can trace the houses from around 1840 to 1860 to a spate of 1880s to these...solid redbrick, no longer London brick, houses of a second-tier neighbourhood that had achieved respectability if not desirability. They are lovely doors, numbers seven and five.
If you click in for a closer look, you'll see that the stained glass designs are identical, the pleasing nine-panel conforming to Aristotelian (and hence late-Victorian) ideals of order, symmetry and, with the central ring, definiteness. They are fine things to come home to and to open, and be ported into your interior life. But how does Number 5 actually get into his house? I'm sure he walks up his path every night and looks over to his neighbour-door with disdain at the shiny suburban brass handle that's latched onto an otherwise admittedly fine piece of wood. He prefers the pale blue to the red, but still, it works a nice contrast and at least he's got the original glass. But the bottom lock on Number 5 tells a hundred stories of someone shambling wearily home and literally opening the door with the key: turning the latch and pushing with the key-hand. Number 5: you've already knocked your lock out of kilter, you're now just waiting to break your key in it and with call-out fees and VAT and it is a very *old* lock and *we wouldn't want to damage your door*, you're probably looking at a £300 hit in the very near future. And for that sort of money you could sort out your damp-proof course, which incidentally you might want to have a look at.
I'll also point out that Number 5 has the same sort of doorbell as I do. I'm not sure what they're called, but if they're called the 'oblong-of-plastic-that-might-as-well-be-fucking-empty' then it wouldn't be too far away from the mark. Mine, and presumably his, came with the house when bought and is such a hassle to change that you play mental tricks convincing yourself that life is actually preferable without a functioning doorbell, in much the same way as a man in love with a vegetarian can convince themselves that life is preferable without meat, or a man in Hull can forget about the existence of any other town. As Dostoyevsky said: "Man can get used to anything: the beast". This rather ignores the reality of hiking to the far end of Regis Road every other morning, walking past the tip and the car-pound to collect any missed deliveries, or for that matter letters bigger than the stamp itself, not that they get delivered to the right address anyway, and wonderful though it is to collect my neighbours' parcels from the depot I'm sure that they'd drop mine round too only my doorbell doesn't fucking work.
The bell is supposed to be a wireless wonderbell, and you put three expensive batteries the size of vases into a separate box with the approximate dimensions of a 1980s midi Hi-Fi system. The bell will ring, deafeningly, the first three times it is pushed. On one of those occasions the ill-fitting grey knob in the middle of the bell will stick into the casing, and the deafening noise will continue. The bell will not work again. On opening the box, you'll find that the batteries, which are large and corrosive, have leaked. You put the box away and do without a doorbell. Two months later, with the optimism of the forgetful, you buy some new batteries. Repeat. I'm sure this also happens to Number 5. I'd ring his bell and ask him, if I thought it would do any good.
I seem to have wandered. I've considered the headline "Solipsistic Bell End" for this post, but that would only create the right impression...Next time I promise to maybe talk a little more about doors.
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