As one door opens...

 

Q: When is a door not a door?

A: When it's bleeding locked!

Many things in life baffle me, but somewhere at the top of the list is the universal requirement to lock one of every pair of double doors.

Think about it, barely a day goes by without you striding confidently up to some inviting portal, only to backhand yourself in the face when you find someone's locked it. Then you perform the Locked Door Morris: pull - two - three - push - two - three - push the other one  -two - three - turn - KICK.

OK, I'll accept that a single one-way door might need an extra tug whether or not it's locked, but push and pull are binary. If it ain't a puller it's a pusher. Even my brain can cope with that. It's an established fact that the human brain is incapable of solving three-body problems. The permutations of two one- or two-way doors, one of which will be locked, fall squarely into this category. Add to that this uniquely British agony: you might be performing the Locked Door Morris while people are looking.

So why is one of them locked? Presumably, at some point, somebody specified that pair of double doors. If it was a public sector building, somebody else then queried the budget.

"Aren't there any cuts we could make, Nigel?"

"Well, we could ditch all these double doors and save enough to build three orphanages, a homeless shelter and a statue to keep the vandals happy."

"No, that's impossible. According to EU Directive 23104/B/8881a.633 Rev 217a we need to install 2.3 doors for each Diversity Strategisation Consultancy we employ. We may have to put double doors on the speed cameras just to meet our quotas."

A few years ago I found myself in an immobile queue for check-in at Stoke Hospital outpatients (They'd spent £x million on a new computer system that took five times as long as the manual system, but that's a completely different rant). The queue snaked along a corridor, threading around a pair of fire doors, one of which was - of course - locked. This effectively blocked the corridor. Being a helpful chap, I released the catch on the second door and opened it.

A couple of minutes later a nurse of some rank, possibly gruppenführer, saw it, tutted, and restored the barrier.

Shortly after that, a pair of nurses hurtled towards us with some piece of mobile and complex equipment. It may have been a tea trolley, but the fact they were in a hurry suggested that some urgency was required. So I opened the door again. They thanked me and clattered off to provide resusciation or, possibly, milk and two sugars.

Oberleutnant Hortense returned. While she was re-locking the door she asked who kept opening it.

"That would be me."

"Well, would you please not interfere. This door is to be kept locked."

"But it's creating an obstruction."

"That is just your opinion. Please leave it alone or I'll call security and have you removed from the hospital."

The exchange didn't end there, of course, but the inevitable conclusion was that I lost. The door remained locked.

I've no idea whether Brussels is to blame for this idiocy, but I have my suspicions. Maybe that's why Brexit is taking so long.

We can't get through the bloody doors.