Stairwell of Doom

We have our own front door these days. When you open it you are greeted by these stairs.

Please admire the dirt-coloured carpet.

The stairs are steep, and for whatever reason, the steps themselves are small, forcing you to descend at an angle. Maybe folks had itty bitty feet in the 1880s.  Fortunately, there is a handrail for clinging on to.

The stairwell was intimidating when we first moved in. The bedrooms are upstairs, while the bathroom is on the ground floor where it no doubt began life as a haunted, unheated outhouse. These days it is a fully tiled part of the flat with all the mod cons, including a particularly useless heated towel rack I wish I could turn off some way besides removing the fuse.

So there you are, your first night in your new place, trying to get used to the new sounds and smells and debilitating feng shui and what have you. Then you have to get up to go for a pee, which involves getting down the stairs without taking a tumble and snapping your neck and you start thinking how, really, chamber pots make an awful lot of sense when you think about it...

I am used to the stairs now. They are less scary, although it will always be a challenge to take a cup of tea up, and if I am using legs fatigued from running, the trip down makes me consider completing the journey by shuffling on my butt.

There is a loft at the top of the stairs, and in theory, if we could reach it, it would be a good place to store camping gear and suchlike. But this is York, so you just know it's packed with slumbering night-gaunts waiting for some fool to free them to raven and slay. And for once that fool ain't gonna be me.