Derekthered's Corsica blog

That'll teach me for making jokes about draughts in Dutch theatres in Corsica Bullitinu. Renée Blom's inscription (see photo, right) of part of a poem by I Muvrini's Jean-Francois Bernardini ("Ne Fermez pas la porte" - "Don't shut the door") on the elegant glass doors of Amsterdam's Meervaart theatre prompted me to suggest that the lobby would be forever draughty.

Well, my words have come back to haunt me. We usually find something interesting when we get back to our little apartment in Lumio after an absence: sometimes we find a little lizard hiding under the doorframe or a bird's nest over the lamp on our terrasse. This time, on the chilly and overcast day of our arrival, we found that our front door had been cemented to the ground and couldn't be budged.

We'd arranged for some new tiles to be laid over the winter, and the folk doing the work had made the level of the front step a shade higher than before. As a result, the door had become totally stuck to the tiles thanks to some excess cement that had worked its way under the door.

We finally yanked it open. And with the help of the guys doing the work, we removed the door, shaved a centimetre or so off the bottom, painted it where the wood had beeen trimmed, and waited for the paint to dry for an hour.

Corsica does get cold in March and never mind not shutting the door - we were without one altogether while this was going on. It was freezing and we stayed in our coats. But I still empathise with Jean-Francois' sentiments about harmony between people and how better communication can improve it.