Photo © Kuw Son under a creative commons licence

Erica and I had a real scare yesterday. As we were just about to leave to spend the day with our eldest son and his family, we locked ourselves out of our house.

I usually lock the front door last thing at night and leave the key in the lock. Each morning I unlock the door and retrieve the key. Well, yesterday it was Erica who unlocked the door. However, she had an armful of food and presents she was taking out to put in the car and she did not take the key from the lock.

Time came to leave and, not realizing that the key was still in the lock, I slammed the door shut. As soon as I had done I suddenly thought I’d better check if Erica had the key. Well, she had her own key, but mine was in the lock inside the house. I took Erica’s key and tried to unlock the door. The key slid into the locki, but it wouldn’t turn.

You know how it is when something like this happens. I couldn’t believe I had done something so stupid. I kept on trying to turn the key, but to no avail. It was not going to shift. Erica and I stood in the rain and I panicked and swore.

What to do? All the windows were shut and locked and we had no phone number for a locksmith (and in any case what locksmith would come out on Christmas Day?). Perhaps we could use a coat hanger to hook the key out of the lock.

I phoned our son to say we’d be late and we went to the garden shed to find a wire coat hanger. Leaving the hook intact I untwisted the hanger and thrust it through the letter box flap. It quickly became clear we couldn’t steer the hook and that we’d never reach the key that way. The only thing left to do was to break a window. We chose one of the double-glazed panels in the front door.

Back round to the shed to pick up a hammer, a board to cover up the broken pane, and some nails from the shed and then we returned to the front door. We decided we’d leave the window intact until we returned home yesterday evening, so we went to put the board, the nails and the hammer into the boot of the car.

Before I put the hammer in the car I thought I’d see what happened if I used it to tap the outside of the lock. I gave the lock a couple of taps. Erica slid her key back into the lock and … lo and behold, the key turned. The tapping with the hammer had dislodged the key on the inside of the door enough to disengage it from the mechanism and we could get back into the house without breaking any windows.

We were both greatly relieved, as you may imagine. Another phone call to our son to say we were leaving and away we went.

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