The miracle of screen doors: A letter to the patio door supplier
Okay, I’m the first to confess that this is a pretty random topic, but it’s been bugging me since the summer. If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you’ll realise that ire inspires at least 50% of my posts.
Dear Mr Patio Door Supplier,
Thanks so much for coming around to give me a quote on getting the patio door to the back garden replaced with one that actually opens properly. I’m sorry it took you fifteen minutes to find our place and I agree that the numbering on our street is really confusing – what with our house being #1, despite being located in the middle of the street, and the block of five flats at the end of the street being labelled #1a, #1b, #1c, etc.
Believe me, we all relive the confusion every Friday night when food is misdelivered up and down the street. I guess it’s an artefact of our block of Edwardian terraces being the oldest houses on the road. Instead of renumbering the houses on the street as it got developed (the usual approach in other countries), the local council just added variations of the same numbers. That’s because it’s clearly worse for people to deal with the temporary inconvenience of having to update their address than the permanent confusion of nobody being able to find half the buildings on the street.1
But I digress. What I actually wanted to apologise for was confusing you when I asked about the possibility of installing a screen door. Look, I get it. Screen doors have only been around for 150 years or so – give or take a decade – and you can’t be expected to keep up with new-fangled foreign developments that are utterly ubiquitous in other parts of the world. It was very rude of me to express my astonishment so bluntly and then to call my husband and sister in to incredulously share the news.
Sure, by 1897 screen doors might have been advertised in the USA as a ‘necessity of modern life’, but why would someone even want a door that keeps bugs out while simultaneously allowing breezes to enter a house? That’s the same sort of decadent thinking that leads to people moving their washing machines from the kitchen – their natural home! – and placing their boilers outside.2 Before you know it they’ve even installed a dryer.3
Besides, this is England, not Florida or Queensland, with their sub-tropical climates and disease-carrying mosquitoes. In fact, internet sources, including ChapGPT, will consistently tell you that screen doors and windows are simply not needed here: the climate is too temperate and the bugs too scarce (and harmless4) to warrant the hassle and expense. To quote Valeanto’s Iron Doors, ‘Though our humidity in the UK allows mosquitos to thrive in the right places, our limited times of high heat mean that they aren’t a concern for very long, and so a screen door would be more of a hindrance than a help’.5
Of course, New Zealand has both a temperate climate and an abundance of screen doors; likewise, Japan has a temperate climate and its own traditional version of screen doors made of paper (shoji) that allow air to pass through rooms. But it’s definitely environmental factors – not, say, culture or tradition – that lie at the root of the English indifference towards screen doors. Because in a country that Kate Fox insists is obsessed with home improvements and DIY, and where people frequently rip out perfectly good kitchens in order to put their ‘personal stamp’ on their property, they would never make changes merely to improve the habitability of their property in the summer!
The point is that screen doors might be widely used in cities that aren’t known for their hot summers, but the English are made of sterner stuff. Besides, if you see a problem, whether it be constantly misplaced deliveries, damp clothes hanging all over your radiator or flies buzzing through the house in the summer, you moan about it and put up with it. You certainly don’t try and fix it – you’re not American, for godsakes!
So thanks, Mr Patio Door Supplier, for helping me to see that when in England, one must do as the English do.6
Yours, etc.,
Kirsten Bell.
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Although Kate Fox suggests that the street numbering system is more in the way of intentional camouflage than anything else, given the English obsession with privacy.
I confess, Mr Patio Door Supplier, that’s where our boiler now lives. Although it’s common to keep the hot water system outside in Australia, our plumber was completely flummoxed when we asked if it was possible. (For the record, it was. All that was required was insulated casing for the boiler.) I know, right? Why on earth would anyone want to put their boiler outside, thus freeing up space in their kitchen?
Yes, we have one of those as well, which I guess makes me someone ‘who doesn’t need to worry about paying the bills and doesn’t care about the environment’ (to quote the reader of my Sapiens article on washing machines in kitchens who emailed to berate me for failing to discuss climate change and energy consumption).
Although tell that to anyone who has ever been attacked by a swarm of midges.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that it’s not possible to install a screen door if you have one of Valeanto’s iron doors.
Not least because of the impossibility of finding a local supplier of a security screen door or a builder willing to install it.