My strategy for perpetual good health has let me down. It appears that,
despite my insistence that I am well, I have a cold. Try as I might, there’s no
denying the aching head, the coughing, the sneezing, and the snot coming out of
my nose.
I was determined, nonetheless, to go to the beach, as it was my last
chance to see Emmy, one of the friends Eleni introduced me to this week; I’ve
only met her twice, and we’ve exchanged a few words, but she’s lovely, and
she’s leaving tomorrow, and I wanted to say goodbye. So when Eleni came to pick
me up this afternoon, I put on my bravest face and my hat, and followed her
meekly to her car. Halfway there, I had a coughing fit.
‘Oh,’
Eleni said, ‘you really are ill.’
‘No,’
I said, because I’ve trained myself not to use negative words, lest the
universe is listening, ‘not ill. I’m
just a different kind of healthy.’
I
can’t tell you whether the look she gave me was one of amusement or pity, but
she was certainly not convinced. ‘We’ll just have to install you in the shade,’
she said. I sneezed into my hands, blew my nose, and shuffled on behind her.
I made it as far as the car park, and stopped.
‘Yeah,’
I said. ‘I’m ill. I’m going home.’ Eleni conceded that this was probably a good
idea. I asked her to say goodbye to Emmy from me, and off I went, shuffling all
the way back home. Where I took some leftover soup out of the fridge, poured it
into a pot, and stuck it in the gas cooker to reheat.
Before I go any further with this tale, I need to share some technical
details about my front door:
1)
It is brand new (only just replaced in August) and
cost 700 euro.
2)
It has no handle on the outside. If it’s shut, it can
only be opened with the key.
3)
If the key is on the inside of the door, it cannot be
unlocked from the outside.
4)
It has a tendency to slam shut, even when there is no
wind.
So there I was, back in the comfort of my home, with my soup heating up
on the cooker, and moments away from a nice, soothing lunch, and my bed. And
then I was seized by an urge to add some fresh rosemary to the soup, so I
opened the door, as you do, and stepped out and over to the rosemary bush, to
pick a sprig or two.
And I heard the click. It didn’t even have the decency to be a slam.
Just: click. Such a gentle, polite
little sound, with such devastating connotations. My mind instantaneously
tallied up all the facts – door shut / key on inside / all windows closed / gas
fire on – and produced the following output:
FUCK FUCK FIRE FUCK BREAK DOWN DOOR SEVEN HUNDRED EURO FIRE FUCK
I performed some sort of comedy, headless chicken routine, whereby I did
a few circuits of the yard, entirely without purpose or logic, and then ran up
to the front door and threw myself against it, shoulder first, like I’ve seen
in films. Once, twice, three times. The door rattled, but remained intact. I stared
at it, dumbly, rubbed my shoulder, kicked my flip-flops off, and sprinted to
Aspasia’s, the nearest house I knew to be occupied. I rushed into her kitchen,
surprising the entire family as they were having their Sunday lunch, screaming
incoherently about doors, fire and men.
‘What?’
Aspasia said, standing up.
‘I’m
locked out!’ I managed. ‘The fire is on!’
‘But
I don’t have your key!’ Aspasia cried, desperately. ‘You didn’t give me your
key!’
‘No
key! I need a man to break the door!’
Aspasia
glanced at her son, George, a bulky man in his early forties and my unlikely
hero of the day, and gave a nod.
‘Go,’ she commanded. And so poor George was
forced to abandon his lunch and dispatched to save the crazy city dweller from
her own silly self.
.JPG) |
Locked doors come in many forms; this is one of the more traditional. |
He didn’t break down the door. Obviously. Being a man possessed of his
senses (mine had evidently fled the scene), he assessed the situation calmly
and arrived at a somewhat less hysterical conclusion.
‘We’ll just have to break a window,’ he
announced, cheerfully. ‘And then you can climb in.’
And, armed like a Sifnos superhero with a long
stick and the rug I use as a doormat (saving me, again, from my own silly self:
my instinct, to use a rock, would have only led to a mangled hand), he smashed
a windowpane, cleared the glass, turned the handle, and let me back in.
What a relief it was, to see the inside of the
door again! George stood outside, beaming, and waved all my thanks and
apologies away.
‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘These things happen.
And if it happens again, you know what to do!’ And with that, he took his leave
of me and went back to his mother’s lunch.
But I can’t afford to smash a window every time a recipe calls for
rosemary. I’m ringing the carpenter first thing tomorrow, to come and replace
the glass and fit a handle on the
outside of the door.
As day 7 comes to a close, and I sit here surrounded by balled-up
tissues (a sign of my alternative health), I’m trying to draw some sort of
positive message from this story, but I’m not sure there is one. Perhaps I
could say that sometimes heroes can be found in the most unlikely places. Or
that there is always a better way than throwing yourself against a locked door.
Or I could just give this up as a bad day and a lesson learned, which is less
about doors and more about solitude being challenging in ways that I hadn’t
expected or prepared for.
.JPG) |
The devil's own rosemary bush. |
One thing’s for certain, however: spontaneous cravings for rosemary are
not to be trusted. If you ever feel such a thing taking hold of you, do not
heed its call. It’s the devil’s work.