Being prepared doesn’t always help!

We all know, or can imagine, the problems that sometimes come with convenience. Those snap closed and locked door latches for example. We recognise the ease with which we can lock the door by just pulling it shut. No need to juggle the key, fidget it into the lock and turn it. It works great – so long as you remember to put the key in your hand, your pocket or you know how you can easily lay your hands on it without having to unlock the door! And we KNOW that we will face dire consequences if we DON’T have a key on the same side of the door as our body.

I can recall two occasions when I found myself and the key on opposite sides of the locked door. One was at Burswood Casino Hotel in Perth some years ago and another happened just four days ago at Giulianello!

The Burswood affair was rather unusual. I had rung housekeeping to arrange for an ironing board and iron to be brought to my room and then I hopped into the shower. I thought it might take a while for it to happen. I had completed my shower and was drying myself when the door-bell rang. It was housekeeping and I said “OK, thanks. Just leave it there and I’ll get it when I am dry”. Then I thought “Might as well get it now”, opened the door and needing two hands to carry it in I left the towel inside. I was stich-less – naked. I carefully shuffled out, leaving my foot in the doorway, grabbed the ironing board and brought it in. Then I returned to get the iron which was on the carpeted floor. I bent down to pick it up, glanced at the morning paper delivered outside the door right alongside and very quickly scanned the morning headline which meant turning around and changing my foot placement. Then “click” – the sound of the door closing and locking! I didn’t even have a pocket to put an access card in!

The first picture that came to mind was that “showcase” set of lifts that transport guests from reception to their room level (and vice versa). They are made completely of glass and they run up and down in the open foyer that has a lovely raked roof that goes from ground level to the fourth floor. These lifts traveling up and down are centre stage and attract the attention of the numerous people who assemble in the foyer which doubles as the bar. I imagined the attention a completely naked Bryan Forby might attract descending the four flours, walking through the bar to reception to organise a spare access card!

Instead I opted to casually walk down the corridor on my level hoping to find a stray housemaid who would be able to open my door. I was amazingly successful! I found the housemaids’ hideaway and there were half a dozen ladies who volunteered to get me into my room.

The more recent occurrence was not quite as daunting. This time I was wearing shorts and slippers!

I don’t eat a lot of bread so I buy a loaf, sliced, and I freeze it, extracting a slice when I need it. Slices of bread thaw very quickly, especially if you put them on a plate and pop it on the window sill and that’s what I do in the mornings to make my toast with coffee. This particular morning was a tad windy and the window closed, jettisoning the plate and pane into the street immediately below the kitchen window on the first floor. The plate shattered, of course, into hundreds of tiny pieces on the cobblestoned roadway. I thought “Better clean that up before much traffic comes!” so down the stairs I raced and began to collect the tiny fragments when, of course, I heard the familiar sound of the door closing! “Shit”, I thought. But, of course, I had anticipated this eventuality! I had given a spare key to my sister-in-law, Gabriella, for precisely this purpose – to rescue me in the event that I closed the door without taking a key! I also had a spare key in my car - double security!

My only problem was that my car key was inside with the door key. My other problem was that my phone was inside too, with both the keys! How could I get hold of Gabriella? Her number is in my phonebook on my mobile which is inside! Nothing for it but to walk to Lariano to retrieve Gabriella’s key – a six kilometre walk, along a potholed road dressed in shorts and slippers at 6:45am. Sounds possible. My only other option was to wait two or three hours for my neighbours to wake up (they didn’t stir, usually, until 10am) and climb from their terrace onto mine. Possible but not without some risk. The four storeys drop from the terrace is forty metres to the asphalt roadway below. The terraces are at different levels so it would mean hanging out over the 40 metre chasm with feet perched on a ledge one tile wide on very flimsy tiles.

So, I sat on my doorstep which is directly on the roadway (the main road of the centro storico) dressed rather discretely, bidding “Buongiorno” – to those going to work, to the shop or just having their morning exercise walk around the centro – for two hours until I could try waking Niels and Karen, my neighbours, at an hour that was, for them, bloody early but to most others, almost reasonable. After four attempts I eventually succeeded in waking Niels (who explained that he sleeps with ear plugs – presumably Niels had been anticipating such an occurrence for quite some time!) We went to the terrace. Niels was decidedly very nervous about my intention to “jump” from his terrace to mine and pleaded with me to take the “safer route” which meant climbing up yet higher onto his steeply pitched, loosely tiled roof and crab walking in my shorts and slippers onto my steep, loosely tiled roof now perched 45 metres above the pavement.

A slip on the tiles (or, more likely, the tiles slipping) would have meant a rather hasty and unscheduled descent that still wouldn’t have gained me entry to my apartment! Having successfully negotiated the width of two roofs I slipped onto my terrace through an opening at the opposite end.

I was bemused during the whole ordeal with the white haired, white bearded edifice of Niels which, like the eyes of Mona Lisa, appeared to follow my every movement notwithstanding my intricate manoeuvres around chimneys, TV antennae and a stack of other encumbrances. If only I had my bloody camera phone I could have taken a string of rather amusing shots from a great many rather complex and intriguing angles!

Niels confided a day or two after that he was very nervous throughout the exercise and several times secretly sought divine intervention albeit not a particularly religious man!

[This is the same roof that Cinzia has consistently and strenuously barred from access to tradespeople of all descriptions – to fix the TV antenna, survey for a satellite dish and even to repair the leaking tiles! In her opinion it is tantamount to a suicide attempt to set a foot on such a savage incline so high above the nearest braking point on tiles that are loosely laid and not set or attached in any way (other than by gravity) to the roof structure. That’s just the way they do tiled roofs in this part of the world. Presumably Niels had been struck with the same apprehension.]