The best laid plans of mice and men

As a coda to London Lidothon (and at Kyle's request), I thought I'd write about my complicated morning trying to leave my friends' house yesterday. They had gone to work, leaving me to pack and get a taxi to the train station - once I was ready all I needed to do was lock the front door behind me as I left, dropping the key through the letterbox.

At 9:40am I'm pretty much ready to go, when I'm surprised to see one of their cats chasing a mouse around my backpack next to the front door. Feeling a bit sorry for the mouse, and to save my friends from finding a dead mouse when they got home from work, I reluctantly cornered the two animals in the downstairs bathroom and shooed the cat away. As the poor rodent cowered in the corner I picked it up in a towel, opened the front door to step outside, and tried to release the mouse.

The first problem was that when I got outside, the mouse was not in the towel - it must have escaped and was still in the house - bad news for the mouse but only a minor inconvenience for me.

The second problem was that in closing the door behind me (to try and prevent the cat catching the mouse again) I had managed to lock myself out of the house. This was bad news for me (and absolutely disastrous for the mouse).

I think it took a few moments for my mind to catch up with the reality of the situation, which began to take on a slightly unreal quality. I underwent a rapid series of perceptual shifts that started with the most obvious fact (the door is locked) and extrapolated to the final consequence (I'm outside the house - thankfully dressed - but without shoes and carrying a hand towel, all my things are inside, my friends won't get home for another 7 hours, and it looks like it might rain). It was like being in one of those lateral-thinking brainteasers: "You're trapped outside a locked house. If you call your friend he can come and let you in, but you need your phone for his number and it's inside the house." Surely there's some solution? Does it have something to do with wheel nuts? Matchsticks? Is the answer printed upside down at the bottom of the page?

I mean, how could this even have happened? Until that moment I'd had no idea that you could lock the door without the key. While I stood considering the turn of events, the cat slunk out of the cat flap in another door and gave me a withering look as it crossed the road.

I knew that the key was still in the lock on the other side. Maybe I could reach through the letterbox somehow and get hold of it? The slot looked quite narrow though, and I pondered the wisdom of trying it: the current situation (i.e. I'm locked out) isn't good, but it's better than the alternative (i.e. I'm still locked out but now my hand is also stuck in the door). I tried it anyway, to no avail. So there was nothing else for it: I knocked at the neighbour's house.

I'm extremely lucky that my friends have such a wonderful neighbour. She didn't know their phone numbers but she made me a cup of tea and let me use her phone and internet (I'm not sure that I would have trusted me if the situation had been reversed, but I'm glad she did). She suggested calling a locksmith to open the door, and half an hour later a man called Tim pulled up, stuck a length of bent metal through the letterbox and instantly popped the door open.

Inside the mouse lay dead on the carpet, and Tim was required to charge me £75 for his 10 seconds of work (suddenly locksmithery looked like a very interesting and lucrative line of work). I called my friend and explained what had happened - he laughed so much that I thought maybe I should charge him too - and was soon on my way home.

Afterwards I did feel sorry for the mouse, and I thought to myself that there hadn't been any winners that day. Well, except for Tim (obviously). And possibly my friend, since he had enjoyed the story. And of course the cat.