If you want to get from the top floor to the three bedrooms on the bottom floor here at the Greek Hovel, you normally just go out of the front door and down the stairs to enter via either the bat room or the rat room, Joshua’s bedroom, which leads onto the main master bedroom. But there is a plan B.
Joshua is developing an annoying habit of wandering from his room into ours to wake up the Mrs or Jayarani and thus the Mrs now locks the joining door to prevent this. If I am upstairs doing work or, as last night, so gripped by a book that I read it into the small hours, I must thus use the emergency door.
The trap door is so heavy that I can lift it but I’m not sure the Mrs would be able to. It is certainly childproof. The stairs are narrow and steep, designed not to just out an interfere with the clean lines in the master bedroom. You would not want to climb down after that many bottles of ouzo. But after reading “The Sentence is death” by Anthony Horowitz of Foyle’s War fame, which I massively recommend, it was not a hard descent.
Heading downstairs by this route has another advantage at 2 AM. I popped my head around the front door to retrieve the keys the Mrs had left there and saw a pair of bright green eyes staring at me from about 20 yards. I have no desire to find out to what part of the wildlife diversity community they belonged. That was another reason to build the escape hatch into the design.
