Last Updated on February 1, 2025 by Tom Kane
I woke up today and suddenly found myself trapped in the bedroom. The bedroom door was locked from the outside. That very fact, the realisation I couldn’t necessarily leave my own bedroom didn’t quite sink in at first. Not only was I trapped in my bedroom, but it seems someone had locked the door from the outside. It’s a fairly heavy sliding door and as I pulled to open it, I could hear the keys in the lock on the other side of the door. Two things occured to me.
1) Someone had broken in and locked me into my bedroom.
2) I desperately needed the bathroom, which is why I woke up in the first place.
Then the first thought really hit home.
Someone has locked me in my bedroom. Who? It was three in the morning, pitch black and freezing cold. My wife was asleep in bed and Mad Max, my Springer was also asleep, in bed (that’s a whole other story) and I was trying to get my sleepy mind into gear. Then it occured to me. Logic dictates that anyone breaking into our house would easily take our large smart TV and our three laptops and then make a run for it. But, I’m a light sleeper, a very light sleeper. Mad Max is also a light sleeper, and his hearing is way superior to mine. The main gate to the patio and parking area is closed and locked, our road is still being dug up and re-laid, eight months after they started it. So anyone breaking in would have had to have made enough noise to wake the dead. And as they wasn’t a Zombie in sight, I deduced nobody had broken in. Logic always wins over panic.
Then the truth of the matter made me realise what the sequence of events had been when we went to bed. The bedroom door, as I said, is fairly heavy. The locking mechanism is like a finger. When the key is turned the finger comes out and drops onto the opposing grove in the side of the doorway, and the door is locked. But the door had banged shut last night, because if you use just a little too much push the door zooms across, bangs on the side and bounces back… except it didn’t bounce back last night.
I locked myself in my own bedroom by using too much force to shut the door and the locking finger had simply dropped across.
Bad design fault that.
But now I knew what had happened, it didn’t help my immediate need to go to the toilet, which happened to be on the other side of the locked door.
At that point, a song popped into my head.
“There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza a hole.”
My brain was trying to tell me something… I REALLY needed to go to the loo!
Luckily there’s a door to the outside in our bedroom. So, I went outside, only to find the door to the main part of the house, was locked. Of course it was, we lock it every night.
I REALLY need the loo. That’s a problem with cancer and the chemotherapy cure, it can play havoc with your waterworks.
So, as the garden needed watering, I watered it.
Now, what to do about the locked door. I was now relieved, in a waterworks sense, and my brain was functioning. I went back into the bedroom and gave the sliding door one almighty tug, and the door opened as the latch part of the door lock pulled away the corresponding metal plate. The door was open, I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to bed.
Trapped! Only in my head.
Copyright © Tom Kane January 2025
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