Leith on life: The Doorbell Paradox

“Ding dong!” How we take the simplest things—like that cheerful, automated sound—for granted. That is the noise that announces the arrival of the postman, arms groaning with Jiffy bags; the trochaic herald of the apple-cheeked grocer’s boy on his bicycle, if such there still be in these parts. Truth is, I don’t really know, these days, because my doorbell has been on the knack.

At the end of last year I moved into a new house. This house had been occupied by the same elderly lady for 63 years, which is how come we could afford it. She’d kept it very nice and neat, but the estate agent’s term of art “would benefit from modernisation” applied. The central heating didn’t go above the first floor and the fusebox looked like something that would have passed muster as alien technology for an episode of Dr Who in the William Hartnell days.

When we got tradesmen round to have a look, they tended to start taking out their mobile phones and saying things like: “I’ve never seen one of these. Would you mind if I take a picture for my blog?” So, bish bash bosh: floorboards came up, the air was filled with the industrial melodies of grinding and clanking, and we spent months stirring plaster dust into our tea and wondering why everything costs so much.

All that was fine. But afterwards, we started to notice something odd. I’d arrange to meet someone at home at such and such a time, and they wouldn’t show up. I’d ring them, irritated, the following day. They’d say, themselves irritated, that they’d been there and where the hell was I? Those red cards the postman leaves indicating a missed delivery—which they scatter pretty liberally in any case—became the norm, even though  I almost never leave my dressing-gown, let alone the house.

This went on for weeks before I had the glimmer of a suspicion. I rang the electrician. “Richard,” I said. “When you were rewiring the house. Did you... disconnect the doorbell by any chance?” “Oh yes,” he said. “Sorry. It was on the old circuit. Forgot to mention it.” There, you see, the nub of the thing.

There are some advantages, I should say, to being doorbell-free. As Sylvia Plath put it in “Daddy,” envisioning the parallel but similarly agreeable situation of having one’s land-line cut off: “The black telephone’s off at the root/ The voices just can’t worm through.” (It makes one ruminate that if the Telephone Preference Service had existed in Plath’s day she might still be with us, but I digress.)

Having no doorbell is like hanging a do-not-disturb sign on your whole life. No jittery ex-cons trying to sell you ruinously expensive dusters; no pushy salesmen trying to sign you up for “free” loft insulation under some just-about-to-end government scheme; no policemen asking you whether the Skoda Octavia parked outside belongs to you because it’s on fire. How attractive it is never to worry that a person from Porlock will break in and expect coffee and biscuits. To be at home but not at home—to have your real-world Google chat settings turned to “invisible”—is a sort of existential desideratum.

Yet it is counterpointed by that other modern concept: the Fear of Missing Out. The person from Porlock might have some gossip.

It became clear that no-doorbell was probably not, in the final analysis, a sustainable lifestyle choice. So I did what any other more or less housebound individual in search of a new doorbell would do. I went online and ordered one on Amazon. Two days later, I found a sorry-we-missed-you card on the mat, explaining that they would attempt redelivery of my new doorbell the following business day. The day after that... well, do I have to paint a picture?

Eventually, after measures whose impracticality and demeaningness prevent me rehearsing here, I managed to take delivery.

A cheap wireless doorbell, I can now say with authority, is a false economy. The one I bought cost about a tenner and offered a choice of 36 different ringtones of which fully 16 were Christmas carols. All of them, from five meters away, were as piercing and metallic as a Dalek attack and yet—also like a Dalek attack—incapable of travelling up stairs, thus inaudible from the floor above. We persevered with this until it rained, and the bell push fell off the door.

Now I’m back at the centre of what future game theorists will no doubt come to call “The Doorbell Paradox.” Yes: sensible minds will say I should simply go to a physical doorbell shop and buy a physical doorbell and carry it physically home. But what if someone calls when I’m out?