Lockout

We were running a bit late, for reasons I won’t go into.  The curry house was booked for quarter to nine, and it was twenty to, with a ten minute drive in between.  At this point, she performed one of her party tricks.

“Have you seen my keys?”

Several minutes later, “Doesn’t matter,” she said, “I’ll take one of the spares.”  It was a blue one.

(I should explain that Bee’s spare keys are colour-coded – blue for front door, red for back, yellow for patio.)

The curries were quite nice.  As were the Cobras and the entertainment.  (There was a football team in).  Indian restaurants do seem to be quite loud on a Saturday night, don’t they?  We had one of those inaudible conversations, paid the bill, motored back up to the house and unlocked the front door.  Except we didn’t.

I’ve never been locked out of my own house (except that one time I was), even less someone else’s.  The blue key didn’t fit the blue door.  Or the yellow door or the red door or even the green door.  (The Green Door doesn’t exist, despite what Frankie Vaughan might tell you.)

We’re not ones to panic.  In this kind of situation, I almost wonder whether failure to panic is the most sensible reaction.  But we didn’t.  All sorts of options were considered, culminating in ‘Get a locksmith’.  Ever tried that in a semi-rural location at half-eleven p.m. on a Saturday night?  The solution is ‘Ask a policeman.’

The local police station was closed, of course, but there was a phone by the door, through which we got a couple of numbers.  About forty-five minutes later the super lock man turned up.  He had a magic device which opened the door without doing any damage (I won’t give details just in case any burglars read this blog – but “just as well you didn’t double-lock it”, he said).  Apparently, some locksmiths will smash the lock even if they don’t need to, for the extra revenue.  Not this one.

So then we spent the rest of the night filling in the insurance claim form.

(The keys were behind the radio.  The blue spare key was a red one.)

(There is a lie concealed within this post.  See if you can spot it.)