When the Doctor Calls

What do you call your rooms?  Names can vary according to use, and perhaps according to a former purpose that is no longer their use.  Take my present home, for example.  We found on line pictures from when it was sold a few years ago, when the room at the front was called the dining room, although it was farthest from the kitchen.  Many years ago my neighbour showed me her flat and I was surprised that, compared to mine, her use of the two rooms was reversed, so she had a large bedroom and a small lounge, while I had a large living area and slept in the smaller room.

A small cottage might have a parlour, a room in which to 'parley' or chat.  In large houses, of a size that I would only see as a tourist, there would almost certainly be a dining room and a drawing room, the latter not for artistic purposes but, as its former name suggests, one to which the ladies would 'withdraw' after a formal dinner, leaving the gentlemen to their own devices at the dining table.  And probably some at least of the bedrooms would have a dressing room next door.

The list of examples of such names is endless.  In my flat one room used to double up as dining room and lounge while, at the same time, one corner was my library and another provided my 'office' space.  Compared to those pictures I referred to, the room nearest the kitchen is now my dining room, although my flat-dwelling times are preserved in that one corner next to the window houses my desk and is therefore my 'office'.

After several house-moves when she was young, my mother lived from the age of eleven in a quite spacious town house that had formerly been two separate cottages, for it had two front doors opening on to the street, one in use, the other permanently closed.  Consequently there were two separate rooms into which those front doors would have opened.  In my early childhood I used to visit my grandparents there, and I quickly learned that one of these, the living room, was where all aspects of life took place, while the other was only used on special occasions and was known as 'the front room' ... despite it not being the only one to which that expression could literally apply.

It will be no surprise, therefore, when I tell you that the council house into which I was born, though it had two of what estate agents would call 'reception rooms', was organised in much the same way.  The larger of these, with windows to front and back, was the living room - sometimes described simply as 'the room', as opposed to 'the kitchen' - while the smaller one took on the 'very occasional use' role and was known as the 'sitting room'.  We were also privileged to have both front and back doors.  We always used the back door, never the front; visitors who knocked there were interrogated through an opened living room window.

And by now you are wondering how all this relates to my title ... patience, please, dear reader: I'm getting to that.  In my new home I have much more space than I did in the flat.  As a result, while most of my living is done in the dining room, the room at the front of the house (notice I don't call it 'the front room') is set aside, in a way following my mother's example, although not intentionally so.  But that's where the similarity ends.  I've adopted a fairly strict rule that the things I generally think of as 'work' end between six and seven o'clock, after which time I retreat to the lounge - that's the name I give it - where I read or watch videos or DVDs and generally chill out until bedtime.

Up to now, however, there had been one drawback to this comfortable ending of the day.  The cosiness of the lounge was undermined in that the door separating it from the dining room wouldn't shut.  The result, initially just visual but, as the autumn draws on, increasingly physical too, is quite chilling.  Yesterday morning a carpenter came to resolve this problem.  His visit was scheduled for 9.30 and at about 9.15, I deliberately unlocked the front door so that it should be ready for his arrival and thereafter wouldn't start anything least I should miss his knock.

Albeit a little late, the carpenter duly arrived, looked the offending door up and down and instantly decided what was needed.  Within the space of twenty minutes or so, he had removed the door, carried it out to his van, where he sliced a little off the bottom, trimmed some wood from where one of the hinges had been fitted, and replaced the door, which now functions perfectly.  He also noticed that the trims on the door handle were loose, so he applied some glue to fix them.  "Just leave them an hour or so and they'll be fine," he said ... and was off.

As I muttered to myself, "Now he's been, I can get on," I realised how closely his visit had resembled that of a doctor of sixty years ago.  My mother would unlock the front door to be ready for him and be quite ill at ease until he had been.  He would bustle in, black bag in hand, take a look at the patient, hear the narrative of symptoms, make a decision, leave a prescription and say, "take this three times a day until it's all gone, and he should be better by the end of the week."  And as she locked the front door behind him, those same words that I had used this morning would accompany her relief that his visit was over.  

Job done, on with the motley!