Hall Stories

Many years ago, most people kept their telephones in the hall. Growing up in a telephone-free household, I pondered this, many a long hour. The only way to get a telephone account was to go to the one public company that offered them – far fewer people actually had one – and join a waiting list. At least one wisecrack has said that since public employees are considered of a lazy twist – note, I say considered – they didn’t want to move any further than the entrance to the house when putting in the telephone wiring. But I never bought any of it, having a theory of my own.
In most suburban houses, when few houses had central heating or decent seating, halls were chilly, comfortless places, devoid of privacy or intimacy – all the more reason to put the telephone there. For the majority of households, the making and/or taking of a call was such a momentous and/or expensive event, that the telephone had to be up front for all to see. The lack of seating combined with the presence of a winter mistral whistling through the eaves discouraged call maker/taker from talking too long, to the economic advantage of all parties.
Of course, it’s different now with teenagers paying for their own romantic follies through the medium of mobile accounts. It also means that they can conduct frowned-upon relationships in secret. There is downside to everything, it seems. Now, I ponder on whether the old or new way is the better – what do you think?

The Gothic Grange

The Gothic Grange. Gothic man does not want to be seen entering and leaving his house. Indeed, it is anybody’s guess where the front door actually is, since one is required to go round the outside of the house, searching the undergrowth for the sight of a doorknob on an ivy-covered wooden door. On this trip, the doorknob seeker is likely to be terrified by the sight of a sinister face staring through the diamond-pane of the ground-floored window. Gothic man would like us to believe that it is his Great Uncle Gus, locked up and grown mad over the years. But it is actually a mildewed, old portrait thrown in as a job lot when he bought the house.
Gothic man himself presents an alarming appearance. He wears shaggy beard, shaggy jumper, baggy trousers and shabby slippers. You will find out why as you enter the house; it is freezing. It also smells of mould. Gothic man would like you to think he inherited his pile, but he only bought it because it was going cheap when the previous owner couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments. The moth-eaten old trophy on the wall as you ascend the staircase was bought in a junkshop. The first room on the landing off the staircase has a pair of lancet windows, like those you see in an old church or castle. It is here that Gothic man keeps his computing equipment – he is actually a programmer, though he tells everyone that he is a poet.
Gothic man tried to keep a cat, but the comfort-loving beast deserted him for a centrally heated house at the other end of the road. The only evidence of livestock is a bat-shaped mobile hanging in the window. It comes into its own at night, when Gothic man turns on a red-shaded light. The bedroom boasts a turret. Here, Gothic man will tell you, a young maiden threw herself to her death, many years earlier, the night before her father was to give her in marriage to an undesirable suitor. But really, the only thing that ever fell from that window, pale and fluttering, was a pair of Gothic man’s own underpants that he was trying to dry after the clothes’ drier in the basement had broken down.

A life of harmony...

His alarm clock bleeps at five-thirty every morning. He spends ten minutes in the shower, ten minutes shaving, five minutes blow-drying, five minutes getting dressed and thirty minutes having breakfast. At six-thirty am precisely, he leaves home. At six-thirty pm precisely, he returns home, climbing the steps of the elevated portico, the entrance to the classic mansion. Nothing spoils the harmony of this façade. Classic man will not even park his car in front of the house, least it spoils the symmetry.

Inside the acanthus-scented dwelling, the visitor can minuet to piped Handel and Bach, witnessing a plethora of perfect triangles, rectangles and circles inherent in the decoration. Indeed, there is a triangle propped over every doorway. Ask classic man if he is a mathematician, he smiles mysteriously and touches the side of his nose. Columns flank the entrance to every room, the ornamentation on top of which denotes the use of said room. The discerning visitor will be able to tell what the following mean: a statue of Venus and Adonis, a plaster cast of grapes and vine leaves, a bronze boar’s head, a gilt chamber pot…