Do not think about mocking

the importance of a new front door

Tove Jansson swimming, Finland © Per Olov Jansson

Dear friend,

Have you ever got the feeling, how when something is changed at home, when a sofa is budged to a new position, or a bookshelf gets built and you find a place at last for Anna Karenina (yet to be read), that just for a few concurrent mornings, it’s like walking into a whole new life?

It turns out my father-in-law has experienced this. When he got a new fridge, he found himself going to peep at it, then exclaiming, ‘the way the door opens so quietly; look how the light comes on so readily!’

The fiction writer and creator of The Moomins, Tove Jansson, explored this idea in her short story, Changing Pictures, which is about how one’s existence can be reinvigorated, one’s vision and life refreshed, by simply rearranging the picture frames on a wall.

Recently we got a new fire-resistant front door. A few years ago, our block was deemed unsafe by the London Fire Brigade and overnight a ‘waking watch’ was implemented. Two ‘fire watchers’ patrolled our building, day and night which cost us, the flat owners, £5,000 per week. Because I live on the 6th floor, half way up, or down, one of the watchers, was positioned along the landing in a chair, facing my front door.

Often I found myself spying on them. Once, I told them not to speak so loudly at night on their phone. Months passed, while we tried to work out how to make our building safe. I even went back on the board of directors who oversee the flats. This became a full-time job. I became both sleuth and student of the Building Safety Act. I went to watch the play, Grenfell: System Failure, in order to understand testimonies from the people responsible for the building’s cladding, to comprehend how the disaster came about. Grenfell was an avoidable tragedy created by human greed, incompetence and one of the worst human traits: lethargy. In the dark shadow left by the murder of those seventy-two residents, are many other tower blocks now deemed unsafe and going bankrupt. We residents are footing the bill to pay to remove the now deemed ‘unsuitable’ materials.

One day, following a chance meeting with a retired fireman I gathered the information we needed. If we had the cladding quickly removed by abseiling, cladding removal experts, then our block would no longer be at high risk and the ‘waking watch’ could be lifted. Our place would feel like ours again.

Taken by the light of the full Hunter’s Moon, October 2024.

The day our door was to be fitted, I was excited. I had bought NICE biscuits for the carpenter, who arrived at 8am on the dot. The first thing he told me was he’d just moved into a new house and had no electricity. Could he charge his phone in my hallway? Then he cocked his head to his armpit, and apologised if he smelt.

‘No shower,’ he said. I thought of flannel washes, local swimming pools, wet wipes; all options available to him. He looked pale, in need of some greens. For a moment I thought of offering him a bath, but Min, my partner, popped into my mind. Don’t be ridiculous, I heard.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told the man, ‘I won’t be sniffing you.’ Then I laughed a sort of mad ha-ha. He did not get it. Was it even a joke? I thought.

Reluctantly I said ‘yes’ to him charging his phone in my hall. I was unsure about what Min would say, but she was not here. Surely I had my own ideas about these things? I made him a coffee and gave him a glass of water. On a plate I measured out four of the NICE biscuits.

The drilling began, and I shut myself in the kitchen, maximising the distance between us. A couple of hours passed, and I made him another coffee and poured a further glass of water. Because of his presence outside my door, I did not enjoy my lunch. I ate several pickled onions from the jar, which I didn’t really want. Somehow, I had gone to pot because what I really wanted to do was offer him a sandwich, but Min’s voice was again in my head, advising me no. Boundaries. He'd had eight biscuits by this point. 

Six hours later, he was still outside, now replacing next door’s door which I was overseeing as my neighbour was away. I was dying to try the lock on mine. I wanted to go out, open and close it, wander in and out breezily, really enjoy the novel everydayness of it. Anything new and I get a childlike fascination with role-playing.

Coming home from a book event at Norwich Book Festival last Saturday, I changed the front room around. It struck me this is how my recently published memoir, Lifting Off, begins after the Prologue.

When I had written about Mum moving furniture back then, I was conveying how at the age of twenty-five, I’d felt locked in by the smallness of her behaviour. But here I now was, aged fifty-two, moving furniture, just like her.

I wondered: How small can I go? How minute can this thinking make me?

I am tall, and large, and take up space in a room with my personality. I like to be seen, and yet I am drawn to the fur, the hair, the moths, the sprays, the minutiae of life.

I wanted to get my keys and try my door. I listened for his noise in my flat. His phone had gone from the hallway floor. When I got to the door, I tried the handle. It was locked. I was locked in. I worked out to turn the nub, and was free to look outside at all of his tools. The whole corridor was filled with dust and bits of wood.

The fitter arrived back soon after. He had taken my mug to another flat, and gone back to fetch it. He seemed reluctant to give me the keys to my door as he still had some filling in to do.

‘Can I just take one key?’ I asked.

‘If you like,’ he shrugged. Was I imagining this tug of war over the door and the access to it? It was now 4pm. I decided the next offer of a drink would be the last of the day.

‘A glass of water?’ I said, and he paused. I realised he was waiting for me to add in the option of coffee. I practiced self-restraint and left space in the air between us.

‘Yes, water would be nice,’ he said. It wouldn’t take much to imagine him as a little boy.

I left him to it at 5pm. I had a date at The Ritzy in Brixton to see the new Almodóvar film, The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. In the film, if the Tilda Swinton character leaves her bedroom door closed, the Julianne Moore character will know that Tilda has taken the pill to cut short her terminal illness and ended her life.

Returning home in the early evening, by the skip on the front path of the flats, two men in beanie hats were busy unscrewing the metal fixtures and fittings from all the redundant doors. Letter boxes, lion head knockers, batteries from the door bell units, all being loaded into a child’s pushchair. Beside them, tucked to the side of the skip, hiding against a brick plant container, a woman was sat on the floor.

Upstairs the fitter and all his tools were gone. He had hoovered up the dust. The new door was in place. The keys worked. We marvelled at its shine, at the beauty of the bright metallic letterbox. It was our first ever unused front door. In that moment, we were newly-weds.

Later, when I took the rubbish downstairs, I walked out the front to see the scrap metal men had disappeared, but the woman was still tucked behind the skip, knees up, her face obscured. I couldn’t get close. Something in my stomach told me not to.

This worried me, so an hour later I went back down to street level. On the floor, where the woman had been sat, were two strips of discarded pink plastic, the sort which could be wrapped around an arm to promote a vein. With my foot, I dragged the plastic out to the gutter.

As I enter the flat; I am calm. I do not need the high from my pretend imagined audience as I enter my hallway. I do run my fingers over the shiny numbers of our front door and feel pleasure. And when I shut the door behind me, I am in my skin, and in my hall, and I realise how important this all is. A place, a house, to see it and know it is safe and lockable. The illusion of safety through objects is real.

Thanks for reading as always.

Keep writing, keep noticing the details,

Love Karen x

P.S. To my V.I.P subscribers who help me keep going with your monthly support, thank you. I write slowly, and these letters often take a series of days to develop so your subscription means the world. Just so you know there will be a new video/sound piece published soon just for you. This extra content is only available to those who are paid subscribers, so if you’d like to become one - please do. K x