THE BLUE POOTLE – NOVEMBER 2006

By Aliya Whiteley

On The Doorstep

The Blue Pootle wonders why we feel the need to have doors; in particular, front doors.

Admittedly, I can see that the alternatives to doors aren’t great. A hole would be too draughty. A tunnel would be too awkward. A tepee-style flap of material would be too ethnic, and a sealed sheet of metal would be too difficult to open, thus defeating the whole point.

But, that said, which moron came up with the concept of a door?

Let me clarify my objection. Doors are solid. Usually they are made of wood. Wood is not known for its transparency. Therefore, when the knocker goes rat a tat tat or the doorbell plays There’s No Place Like Home, we must take pot luck and open the door in order to find out if our visitor is the man from the Lottery with a million pound cheque or a dog rapist from the back of a passing prison van. I don’t know about you, but I’m the careful sort. I don’t do surprises, particularly ones that involve being held hostage in my own home by a stranger who has given me the affectionate nickname of Fido and is waiting for negotiations with the police to provide him with a choke chain and a Volvo estate for transportation.

Okay, so that’s a little bit of a made-up scenario and nothing quite that bad has actually happened to me. That’s not to say that I haven’t had callers to whom I would not have opened my portal if I had known in advance what awaited me. For instance:

• Only a few days ago, on the night that is known by the moniker of Halloween, I opened my door to discover a teenage boy with a cigarette in one hand, a fake gun in the other (well, I hope it was fake), and a sneer in place as he informed me it was time to choose between a trick or a treat. I’m not a teenager hater – I wasn’t ever one myself, but I did have friends who were – so it wasn’t his age that bothered me. It was the fact that I live on an Armed Forces base, and to get confronted by a Halloween nasty dressed up in an Army uniform that has been liberally spattered with blood is not my idea of a joke. Call me boring. I spent the rest of the night worrying about Hubby who was away in a sandy inhospitable place, and feeling waaaay too freaked out to enjoy my favourite John Carpenter classic. Robbed of Donald Pleasance and a one note synthesiser soundtrack, I was.

• I got accosted by a pushy salesman who eyed me up as a pushover and demanded to speak to my parents about the wonders of the new magic invention he was promoting (something about trimming facial hair and growing cress simultaneously, if my memory serves me well). I was thirty-one at the time. Wanting to avoid a confrontation – and those five words are actually my middle names – I told him my parents would be back later. The salesman decided to come in and wait for them. Half an hour passed. When poor Hubby came home from work, he found himself pretending to be my father in order to get said pushy salesman to leave. That was one piece of roleplaying that did nothing for either of us. And the salesman looked a bit uncomfortable too.

• While visiting my parents back in my home town of Ilfracombe, I was unexpectedly visited by an old school acquaintance who had since married a Jehovah’s Witness, and was now doing the daily rounds in an attempt to convert us doomed unbelievers. I have no problem with this. If I believed that everyone was going to burn in Hell for all eternity unless I could convince them otherwise, I’d be out doing the rounds too. So I did the pleasant thing, took some of her magazines and invited her in for a coffee. At this point things got complicated. It took only three sips of Gold Blend (my mother’s choice, not mine) for her to break down and confide in me that she hated her husband, loathed her new family, and detested her new religion. She stayed on the sofa for two hours, repeating, ‘And I don’t even get Christmas,’ like a badly trained parrot. And nothing I said was any use. No, she couldn’t possibly leave him. No, she couldn’t possibly renounce her faith. No, there was no way she could flee the country and start anew as a Guatemalan Goat Herder. There was no helping the woman. She left the house with as much optimism as when she’d arrived. I left with a new weight on my shoulders and a desire to seriously avoid all doorstep encounters for the rest of my life.

So there you have it. We need an alternative to doors. I really don’t want to open mine any more, at least, not without an early warning system in place. I suppose I could get one of those peepholes, but the whole thing sounds vaguely seedy. I’m opting for technology instead.

So if you ever visit me at home, and spy a webcam fixed to the knocker, give me an extra special smile. I might even let you in.

Word of the Day: Gumfiate. To cause to swell or puff up.

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