h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This week marks the 40th anniversary of my Grandfather's death. I am reminded of the old man every time it snows, or when someone slams a door. The association of the two things, my grandfather and a slamming door came about like this...

I was a six year old boy, sitting around our farmhouse kitchen table with my five cousins, one late December evening. A howling snow blizzard was raging outside, and my cousins and I, all roughly the same age, were running in and out of the kitchen, through the back door into the snow, and then running back in again, as a sort of game. How easily were kids amused back then!

"Don't slam the door!" Shouted my grandfather each time one of us charged through it, only to be followed a second later by the crash of the old wooden door. "I've told you lot, not to slam the door!" Shouted Granddad again, unable to make himself heard above the screaming kids, the crashing door and the howling storm. Once again the door crashed shut, was thrown open by another six year-old barrelling through it, and crashed shut again.

"Right that's it!" Shouted Granddad, marching to the closet under the stairs where he kept his toolbox. "If you kids can't learn to close a door properly, then you'll all have to do without one, until you can!" Whereby he proceded to take out a giant screwdriver, and unscrew the door from its frame, as the wind whistled into the kitchen, and the snow blew in great gusts around his face and shoulders. He stood the door up against the back of the house in the yard, and for the first night we all thought Granddad was a really funny man. However, he wasn't kidding. We went to bed that night, and the door stayed where he had put it. How dangerous that would be, to leave the house open all night these days!

In the morning we all swept the great snow drift out of the kitchen, as our icy breaths swirled in the morning air. The whole house was freezing. We were made eat our breakfasts in the kitchen as usual, and not until we had proved to Granddad, by opening and closing other doors in the house properly, that we could do it, was the old kitchen door put back on, two whole days later.

Now I am a 46 year old dad, and I still cannot slam any door, even today; nor can I even hear a door slam without smiling, and thinking of the old man, and a simple, childish, Christmas game with my cousins, so long ago...