Golden Arches and Darkened Doors

Last week I had a couple of curious experiences. 

The first involved a great transatlantic culinary tradition. The other was enhanced, or more accurately made a little frightening, by thoughts of another, and extraordinary, transatlantic custom.

The first took me down memory lane. 

Ah, nostalgia, nostalgia. It casts a gentle, attractive light over memories, even of things that weren’t that pleasant when we experienced them. That was the case, for instance, of my latest visit to McDonald’s. 

Yes, they of the golden arches.

My sons, to my surprise, gave up on the delights of chain restaurant hamburgers while still young. I don’t think they were even teenagers. Once they no longer wanted to visit these fine establishments, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and brush their dust off my shoes.

Not that I stayed away entirely. I once had a colleague who swore by the delights of ‘Maccy Ds’, as he affectionately called the place. In his case though, it was more as a source of coffee (and secondarily of WiFi) rather than of hamburgers. Offsite meetings with him tended to take place in ‘Maccy Ds’ and that gave me the opportunity to discover that they served coffee which was precisely as much to my taste as were their hamburgers. 

Apart from these unfortunate exposures, I escaped any further contact with McDonald’s for a quarter of a century. But the thing about becoming a grandparent is that it gives you the opportunity to relive some of the best experiences of being a parent. As well as some that are rather less appealing.

Let me say at once that seeing Matilda’s delight in being offered lunch at McDonald’s was pleasant enough to make up for many of the exasperating aspects of being there. She was happy and a three-year-old’s happiness is highly infectious.

There was serious exasperation, however. Indeed, my memories of visits to McDonald's had set the bar fairly low, but somehow the reality of returning to those haunts, contrived to get below it. And the cause of my disappointment? Not the quality of the food, which was exactly as I remembered it. It was the weird slowness of the service. It took us nearly twenty minutes to be served, which was a little tedious, since we’d chosen a fast-food establishment because we were short of time.

I don’t expect fast food to be of outstanding quality. But I do expect it to be fast. Fast food served slowly? Feels like lose-lose.

Fast food served slow? Sounds like a double whammy

The other weird experience of the week came at 11:00 one night. I got an urgent phone call from my wife. A neighbour’s daughter had contacted her in some panic after finding it impossible to get through to her mother, by mobile or by landline, for several hours. Since the daughter lives in Valencia, the best part of half an hour’s drive away, she wondered whether we could call on her mother. Danielle was with our grandkids in the Madrid region, so that had to be me.

Well, there was no answer to the doorbell at her gate. There were no lights on in the house. I decided I was just going to have to go in, something made easy by the fact that we have a set of her keys (as she has a set of ours); unfortunately, the easiness of the task was somewhat reduced by the fact that I had no idea where they were.

Even after I’d rung Danielle back and asked her where the keys were, I had trouble finding them. When I finally did, I had to kick myself for an obvious attack of what she calls ‘testosterone blindness’. They weren’t just visible. In fact, they were blindingly obvious. I had simply failed to see them even when I was looking right at them. That rather proves that looking at things isn’t quite the same as seeing them.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of my problems. There were six keys in the bunch. One of the six had to be for garden gate. Two of the other five had to be for the two locks on the front door. But which ones?

The key question: which is the right one?

It took me a while to find out, fiddling around in the dark and trying different keys in different locks. I had my mobile so I could use its light, but holding a phone in one hand, for the light, while identifying a key in the other, for the lock, isn’t that easy.

As I was searching, and making, I reckoned, quite a racket of it, I heard a snuffling sound from inside the door accompanied by little canine whimpers. It seemed that even if our neighbour hadn’t spotted me, her dogs had.

“Hi, dogs,” I said, to comfort them. That fine novel, A Hundred and One Dalmatians, makes the point that dogs don’t like to be called ‘dog’ but, in my experience, they don’t give a damn. Besides, the snuffling sounds I could hear sounded friendly, with no barking or growling, as I’d expect from dogs that know me.

Eventually, I got the right keys in the right locks and was able to enter the house. That’s when I began to feel some real dread, wondering what I was about to find. A desperately sick neighbour? Perhaps even a dead body? It took me a moment to build up the resolve to step into her sitting room.

And there, to my immense relief, I found a light on and my neighbour, looking acutely frightened but upright and otherwise well, watching with wide eyes this weird intrusion into the privacy of her home. 

“Oh, wow!” I told her, “I’m so pleased to see you well.”

Within minutes we were laughing about the whole experience. Her mobile was on silent and the phone on her landline had simply given up the ghost (she’s bought a new one since). As for the doorbell, she’d been so deeply asleep that she simply hadn’t heard it – it was the dogs that woke her.

I headed home a few minutes later, leaving her already on the phone to her daughter.

So everything worked out fine in the end. Although, when she got home, Danielle did point out how much more ugly things might have been had I been on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Just as well it didn’t happen in the Sates,” she said. “She might have had a gun. An intruder facing a frightened woman with a gun? You could have been dead by now.”

A chilling thought. And here’s my question to any Americans reading this: how would you handle that kind of situation?