Sliding Doors
Harbouring dreams of redesigning it into a chic office space/yoga studio, we smashed to pieces the spare bedroom’s built-in wardrobe. Lacking the correct tools, and in a sort of destructive cannibalism, we used the pieces which we had managed to prise off without tools as substitute tools to break apart the remainder.
Random bits of metal from the drawers became bendy crowbars. Chunks of wood became mallets (not very useful when you hit them into the sharp end of a nail). Several days of levering and thwacking later and (the bits of the frame which are still stuck into the wall notwithstanding, because they are in fact still standing) the wardrobe was but several piles of semi-organised slabs of wood and bags of nails.
These are booked in for reconstitution as bookshelves, but lacking the interior design knowledge to perform said reconstitution, they have for the moment remained as these piles.
But I made a bingo sheet of goals for 2025 and 'make a bookshelf' is on the list along with doing a half marathon, learning to play one song on the guitar and baking 160 baguettes (one loaf of bread is equivalent to 4 baguettes under my highly accurate system. I'm on 16 so far).
I wrote a book before Christmas. You can buy it here. I'm going to keep posting it until you all buy it, so you may as well buy it now.
So I am hopeful that the boxes of books which have for the past eight months been haunting various cupboards in our flat (including for a time before phase one of the destruction of the built-in wardrobes, in the built-in wardrobe) will finally have a place to call their own, to spread their pages and breathe in some air which hasn’t been evaporating and condensing repeatedly in the microclimate of their not-so-temporary cardboard home.
The bookshelves will also perform a second function as a mask behind which we can hide our shoddy paintwork (as referenced in this blog).
Where was I going with this? Ah yes. Another thing that has been bothering us for the past eight months. The sliding doors on the built-in wardrobe in the primary bedroom. Prone to sporadic immobility and with a propensity to occasionally come apart with a screeching noise so grating as to attract all of the mice within a 100-mile radius. The kind of daily annoyance that we for some reason live with despite the likely simplicity of its fixing.
As I found out today.
Examining the screeching doors, I found the culprit fairly quickly. They are connected to the rail at the top with a plastic clicker and at the bottom they have a wheel which guides them along a track. Or that’s what they are supposed to have. One of the doors was lacking both an upper clicker and a lower wheel. Such an obvious cause of our inconvenience, and yet it had remained uninvestigated for more than half a year. Why?
Why do we allow such trivial problems to plague us for so long? Why does the door handle stay wobbly for so long, why does the lid of the recycling bin not work properly? What do you mean 'not work properly'... - you know what I mean.
You try and put in an empty jar of olives, a carton of oat milk. It should open how it used to. It should open so that you can slide your trash in without causing any issues. But it doesn’t. It used to. You remember when it used to. It doesn’t now. It hasn’t done it like you remember for maybe a year now. Every time you try and open it, the lid catches a bit and it takes an extra moment or so to stop yourself so that the jar doesn’t fall to the floor. Sometimes the jar does still fall to the floor. It hasn’t smashed yet. The broken lid hasn’t caused a smashed jar yet, but you know it will do at some point, so why haven’t you fixed the lid?
Today we fixed the lid.
Using one of the doors from the built-in wardrobe which we had lovingly dismantled by force, we replaced the faulty one. This new one had both the plastic clicker and the wheel in the right place. It doesn't make the screeching noise. And it moves when you push it. What’s that sound you can hear instead? It’s the combined sighs of relief from all of the times it would have remained stuck over the next six months.
Ahhhhhhhhh.
Perhaps this could have been avoided. Perhaps there was a moment last summer when one decision could have been made differently. When one flap of a butterfly’s wings could have set us on a different path. The difference between making it through one set of doors and not making it.
But we’ll never know, because our sliding door was broken.
This is the second University Challenge article about sliding doors during the current series. Jack McB wrote a great one which was actually about the show, on the UEA-Warwick first-round match-up.
You might be wishing you made it through the sliding door to the world where this intro didn't exist, so I'll get on with things and start talking about the second coming of Christ('s College, Cambridge), who are blessed with the incredibly appropriately named Brendan Bethlehem.
They won their first-round match against Exeter, Ox, and face an Oxford college for the second time running. St Edmund Hall beat SOAS in round one, with a similar score to Christ's, so this promised to be a good match.
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J. Kilvington
Here's your first starter for ten.
Luu takes the opening points for Christ's with Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women. Our book club read Little Women over Christmas, and there is an incredible scene with pickled limes which the 2019 film mentions but doesn't go into as much detail on. I would say that the book is worth reading for that scene alone, but it's a very long book, so I'll just say that it's worth reading that scene.
They take a single bonus before Liu makes this a Liu vs Luu game with a starter for Teddy Hall. A brilliant early buzz of myoglobin by Despard gives Christ's the lead again, and this time they don't relinquish it so easily, with Bethlehem and Luu grabbing starters to give them a 60-point cushion.
Elkington hits back for Teddy Hall, winning them a bonus set on video games which they struggle on. Bethlehem knows that Lyon is the capital of French gastronomy, and Despard recognises several scientific uses of the letter P, putting them nearly a hundred points clear.
Another early buzz from Despard could have set Christ's on their way to an easy win, but he is wrong with Henry IV, losing five points and allowing Teddy Hall captain Bursey to collect ten with Henry V.
No one knows the music starter so Elkington wins the bonuses on a replacement, and when he takes a second consecutive ten-pointer Teddy Hall find themselves a mere twenty points behind. It looked like we were heading to another dominant win, but that is no longer the case.
Still, Bethlehem doesn't like how close things have become and takes another starter for himself. A rapid starter from Firman eases the pressure on Christ's, but the second picture starter goes to Liu so they can't relax for too long.
They decide at this point that enough is enough, and don't allow Teddy Hall another point for the remainder of the contest, ending with a commanding lead that doesn't tell half the story.
Christ's 215 - 100 Teddy Hall
Looking at the final score you would say that Christ's cruised it, but things were in the balance until the final few minutes after they fell asleep in the middle. I suspect they will need to up their game if they are to beat UCL, Imperial or Bristol in the QFs.
For Teddy Hall, a solid performance in defeat, but never quite enough to win.
Next week Cardiff play Queen's, Belfast. Subscribe to the mailing list before Twitter disappears into a puff of smoke.
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