This Guest Will Fertilize Your Guardian

The diabolical lock.

Well, I know that this story is going to be referred to in the future and I will have to defend myself so please remember that at least I was gracious enough to have been the one to tell you about this particular dilemma. And only so that you could have a laugh at me.

So on my first night staying as a guest at a fairly distant relative’s house in London, I woke up at 4 am having to use the washroom. The wine consumption that evening made this a particularly urgent thing. I go to the door to my bedroom and I can’t open it. It’s quite an old house and earlier that day, Sam had shown me that there was basically a hole where a knob would normally be – and to open the door one had to stick this handle in it, pull back, twist around and maybe more. Well, I performed all those actions, with increasing panic and adrenaline as my case became dire, for probably 25 minutes. At about 15 minutes in, I heard a snap that suggested that I had gone and broken the door. Just to clarify, this was a medical emergency. To go back to sleep would have been actually impossible and my animal instincts were already taking over in a disturbing way as I scanned the room for possible solutions.

It did not pass my attention in this hour of need that I might call out to Molly and Sam’s bedroom and have them open the door for me. But imagine, my first night there, I’m just getting reacquainted with these nice people, and then I call out in the dark from my room like a toddler in the night? I just couldn’t do it.

The guest room I was in was quite pretty and it has these big glass veranda doors that open up to the courtyard. So, with my whole intellect revolting against doing this, I decided to go out and relieve myself in their yard. Obviously I am in the last 3 minutes before breakdown, otherwise I’d still be racking my brains for a more dignified solution. Find it’s locked. Scavenge through the room like a wild woman and find lock. Unlocks but door won’t open. A minute of hopping on one leg and racking my brain helps me discover that the doors are merely bolted on the top and bottom.

So I run out into the dark courtyard: and the security lights are on me like strobe lights. The image of my hosts looking out at me squatting in the grass like the Canadian barbarian from backwoods Saskatchewan that I already feel like in London is just too much for me to handle. Therefore I find a dark corner of the courtyard and like a creep I start peeing.

This is the part that my brothers are going to laugh at the hardest, because it’s so me. Of course, my imagination has to get the best of me and I become fearful and panicked, as I have done in many family anecdotes. While peeing, I get a flashback to Sam mentioning that there is a fox that is “always in the garden” and that I “will probably get to see tonight if I look out the veranda doors” of my room. I’m not going to lie, I raced back to the room actually squealing with displeasure and feeling for sure that the fox was at my heels.

Yeah, so I’m a freak. But I’m over it. I also ended up locked in that bedroom for half of the next day, but I won’t go into details.

Hope I made you laugh.

I have more London postings to put up, but I have to write them first. The day I just spend in Devon with my Uncle Tony and his kids definitely deserves a posting, but I’ll wait till I have photos.

Tomorrow I take the train back from the coast into London and then it’s off to Spain, where I have a feeling much more o