Let me explain.
A recent weekend trip to Christchurch necessitated a fair amount of visiting; friends, relatives etc etc. And all that visiting entailed a lot of cups of tea/coffee/booze. And obviously there are repercussions in terms of such consumption.
Ordinarily this would not be a problem as the required facility in most people's houses is clearly evident.
Anyway, there I am in Christchurch, staying in four different houses in four different days and I'm getting tired as we pull up to the home of my last host on dark. I'm very late.
Pleasantries are exchanged and we sit down to dinner.
As seems to be the case in Christchurch these days discussion turns to the effects of the earthquakes and the rate of rebuild and/or repair.
It's not fast enough for my host who bemoans the fact she has a hole in the floor that has been there for three years now and there's still no sign of the builders to fix it. Apparently carpet has been pulled over it and the area is basically avoided.
So dinner is dispensed with, a coffee is served then it's basically time for bed.
Satisfyingly fed and watered, I settle in to a deep sleep in the bedroom I am shown to at the far end of the house.
And there I stay until 2.37am when the curse of the over-50s arrive and I discover I need to spend a penny. (Youngies note: A penny was a coin that opened the door to a very important place. Google it.)
Now I have a dilemma. Nobody showed me where the most important room in the house was.
Do I wake everybody up by turning on all the lights? Do I knock on their bedroom door and ask them? Do I wander through the darkness in the hope I'll stumble across it?
The last option appeared my only real one so I opened my bedroom door and peered out into the hall. Then a new dilemma came to mind.
Do I stroll confidently through the dark in my Y-fronts (Youngies look that up, too) like I would at home or do I exercise some level of decorum and put my strides on? I settle for the latter.
Then I'm thinking OK, now I'm only half dressed. Will I still scare the bejesus out of someone if I meet them in the dark? Probably, so I stick a shirt on, too. Now I'm thinking I could be mistaken for a burglar. Oh well. Just have to chance it. Either that or there is going to be an accident soon.
So off I go.
I figure this is an old house. It won't have a modern bathroom attached to the bedrooms. It'll be down the other end somewhere.
I inch forward into the lounge and step on something that feels like a casually discarded remote. I hop on to the other foot and frighten a cat. (Now I think about it I hope it was just a cat). It takes off into the dark. Waiting to take revenge I bet.
About halfway across the darkened room - and I'm talking pitch black - I remember the hole in the floor.
Great. I'm bound to fall through and be lost forever. One hundred years from now they'll find my skeleton ... and probably that of a cat at the edge of the hole who died from laughter. Suddenly my outstretched hands find a wall and inching along it I find a door.
It creaks as I open it and cold air from the next room rushes out to meet me. And there's lino on the floor.
It's a sign; a bit like finding a tree in the desert. You know there's water nearby.
Lino usually means either kitchen or bathroom. It did - the latter.
Such was the urgency of the situation I gave up looking for the light switch. It turns out in such an old house they are not where you'd expect. I simply didn't have time to pat down the wall looking for it. There was relief and subsequent fulfilment to be had. And it was.
The journey back to the Shire of Slumber was uneventful and quick. Maybe you've noticed they always are in epic adventures. The Hobbits took something like 15 hours in film time to get to their destination; and five minutes to get back home.
Of course, they hadn't had to face the terrifying journey I'd just endured but at least we did have something in common.
We could all claim to be Lord of the Ring - except mine was a porcelain one.
-Kevin Page has been a journalist for 35 years. He hasn't made enough money to retire after writing about serious topics for years so he's giving humour a shot instead.
