Sliding Doors Moment

I've done my homework this week, which included re-watching the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie that popularised the phrase sliding doors moment. I'm going to assume you're familiar with the movie (but if not, just google 'Sliding Doors 1998 film' or search out the synopsis on Wikipedia). I've seen it a few times and it still holds up well, even though my opinion of Ms Paltrow took a dive when she married the Coldplay frontman in 2003, and seriously plummeted when she set up Goop (for all the weird pseudo-scientific lifestyle fads it spawned). 

Sliding doors moment is a phrase which attempts to capture that seemingly inconsequential instance that nonetheless profoundly alters the trajectory of future events. As such, it is loosely allied to the fork in the road and the roll of the dice. It does have at least one interesting precursor in the world of the arts and that is J.B. Priestley's play 'Dangerous Corner'. In it,  a chance remark at a dinner party, and the insistence of one character that the truth should always be told, leads to a (slightly improbable) series of acrimonious revelations and confessions by six of the seven present that reveals embezzlement, lying, unhappy marriages, secret love affairs, attempted rape, manslaughter mistaken for suicide, and culminates in a real suicide. After the curtain falls, it rises again and the opening scene of the play is re-enacted without the chance remark, with all seven characters happily talking and enjoying an after dinner dance to music from the radio - truths concealed and dangerous corner averted.  

Moving away from chance remarks, and fanciful glitches in the flow of time and destiny, real sliding doors (and I've lived with a few) are normally expedient devices inside smaller dwellings where space is at a premium and the turning space required by a hinged door would take up too much precious room. They are sometimes installed as dividers when two rooms have been opened up into one. The cottage I had in Berkhamsted featured two sets of sliding doors off the living-room: one was to the kitchen and one was to the stairwell. The living-room was so small that hinged doors would have wasted a quarter of the available space. I believe they are also quite popular in conservatories - and of course they are almost ubiquitous in the world of lifts (or elevators for my US readers).

Mention of Berkhamsted, through which the ribbon of the Grand Union Canal threads, reminds me that canal boats (and by extension many other water craft) have sliding doors, often more correctly called sliding roof hatches - per the illustration below - for the same reason that space is at a premium.

sliding hatch door on a canal narrowboat

And now, as often happens, I'm floating off on an idea about boat people, economic migrants, absentee Tory baronesses (check out the Michelle Mone PPE scandal) and the sliding doors that divide the filthy rich (with their super yachts ) from the pitiful poor (in their leaky barges). I've tried to encapsulate that outrageously unacceptable dichotomy in this latest poem (subject to improving tweaks).

Boaty McPeople

Out of the blanket of morning mist ghostly ducks 

serenade the sides of narrow boats tied on the tow.

Mostly deserted this coldest of seasons, a low row

of leaky barges hugs the margin of ribboned water

and inside one, Donna and child shiver together in

their condensed berth while Joe's off on his bicycle

looking for any work that might buy food, warmth,

pay the rent, alleviate their straitened circumstance.

Several hundred miles away in the south of France

where luxury yachts of billionaires  ride at anchor

in the sparkling sun of Sant Tropez Bay, a baroness

can sunbathe nude on the deck of the 'FU', paid for

by a shady scam while her other sloop named 'FU2'

is full of Tory cronies cruising Caribbean islands in

pursuit of fun and tax havens. It wasn't mere chance

this disparate parallel, it's the way things are rigged.

Joe and Donna had a simple dream but were always

the mortgaged poor, and when redundancy's sliding

doors snapped their unremitting jaws they were out

of luck, home repossessed, economic flotsam, babe

in arms. It wasn't just that women couldn't afford to

buy fancy lingerie anymore. Brexit pulled the plug

on livelihoods across the land and you can't feed a

family on promises of a brighter tomorrow. It says

'Dreadnought' on the stern of Joe and Donna's boat

but that's a laugh for they know they're sinking fast. 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)