THE DOOR

Sometimes, I’ve been known to get more than a little bit obsessive.

“Only sometimes…?” I hear you holler in a most unbelieving manner.

Well, HAHAHA to you and your immaculate perception…

Anyway, it’s rather undeniable that ’tis unfortunately so very true.

Like when I spotted an amazing looking wooden door when I was driving home the other day and I decided that I simply had to immortalize it, despite not really being in a good position to do so.

In the middle of the rush hour, I pulled over into what looked like a lay-by and began fiddling with my teffalone with a view to taking a suitable snapshot to record this doorway for posterity.

Sadly, I failed to notice two things: The first was that the blazing sunshine as coming from directly behind the building into which the door was supplying access and the second was that the lay-by I’d pulled into was actually an exit road for a small industrial estate.

I’d hardly pulled the phone out of my pocket, waited for it to boot up, and fiddled about trying to select the camera option, when I realised that cameras – especially ones built into teffalones - are far less sensitive to the subtleties of light than the average human eyeball is, and that the best I was going to get from my hastily pointed pictures was a murky blur.

As I did my best to get something out of my hasty act of parking up, it became apparent that a large silver car was waiting for me to get out of their way as they tried to leave whichever business they’d been visiting and that I was basically making a right old idiot of myself. So I hastily pointed the camera-phone out of the window, clicked it a couple of times, and pulled back into the queue of traffic as best I could.

A couple of hundred yards farther up the road I pulled over once again at the next available safe spot to examine the spoils, only to find that I did indeed have a couple of murky rectangles for my trouble and, giving up on that particular attempt, I waited for several minutes for the unforgiving traffic to allow me to join it again feeling rather disappointed.

At home, trying out the new photo-editing software on my Kindle, I couldn’t get much out of those pictures, although one filter did give me a kind of painterly effect of which I was rather pleased, even if it failed to show the intriguing peeling and flaking paint patterns which had first caught my eye.

Overnight, as I lay awake, amongst other matters, I found myself fretting over this failure, and determined to give myself another shot at taking a half decent shot before someone decided that painting their door was long overdue and the opportunity to photograph it faded forever.

Have I mentioned that I have been known to get slightly obsessive?

The following morning, I pulled up on my way to work, a couple of hundred yards away from that doorway, and had another go, and this time the light was far less unforgiving and I only had to step back into the road one single pace in order to frame a half decent shot and, luckily, I’m not quite so obsessive that I’m not prepared to look whether anything’s coming before I do something like that, and I was able to get a couple of shots off before any buses, vans or wagons came hurtling along to squish me flat.

Looking at those pictures now, of course, I can scarcely believe that they were worth all of that fuss and bother but, well, I suppose that I’ve recorded them now and, at least, I can relax about it until I start obsessing about the next pointless thing.