“One door opens, another shuts behind...”

- Lyric from a song by Richard Thompson

DOORS of one sort or another are on my mind this week. The reason for this is that at home right now we have hardly any. A man with a van has taken most of them away.

We woke the ‘kids’ – which is to say the young adults – with our hammering and muttering early on Monday morning, as we attempted to extract recalcitrant old screws lacquered in ancient paint.

“The house will feel funny without them,” said the van driver, as he loaded up the doors. They were off for a bath, but not one you would want to share. There will be caustic soda in that tub instead of bubbles.

The offspring yawned at the crack of 7.30am and wondered if it was worth trying to sleep without a bedroom door. The middle one pulled this off quite well.

It’s funny how you take a door for granted until it is no longer there. Doors have been with us for a long time. I did a lazy Google and netted some not very interesting information.

Isn’t that often the way?

There is so much out there, but when it lands in front of you it tends to disappoint. These facts flapped about like fish dying on the quay. Doors, they’ve been around since the Egyptian pyramids and they are mentioned in the Bible. That was about the size of it.

Some of our doors appear to be original to the house, which was built in 1926, although their panels had been hidden beneath sheets of painted hardboard. That used to be quite the thing; now the thing is to have them back the way they were.

Others we bought locally from a young couple who were doing up their first house and didn’t want all those old doors. We took them with open arms.

Or, more strictly speaking, open tailgate on the carry-anything estate (you need one of those in our family: doors, old furniture, a broken-down scooter, various bicycles, guitars, amplifiers and assorted band members, the accumulated debris from three years at university – that old car has swallowed the lot).

An elastic fastener stretched tauter than a crossbow secured the tailgate for the short journey to their new home and ours.

Anyway, here are some other doors:

• Let’s start with the door to salvation. This should be shut by now, according to one of the emails I received about how the world was going to end last weekend. The proselytiser for this now-postponed event used the Bible to justify his prediction. The Bible may comfort some, and fair enough, but to others it can be an excuse for this sort of evangelical loony-tunes behaviour.

Which is probably a shame, but all I can offer on that one is an agnostic shrug.

• The door to a footballer’s hotel room – this is now open, thanks to a Twitter onslaught and a grandstanding MP who named the privacy-seeking footballer in Parliament (Ryan Giggs, as every fool now really does know). So take a peek if you wish. As it happens, it is beyond me why anyone is in the least bit interested. Footballers and big-breasted models – it’s what happens, isn’t it? What a shame that nearly all the attention on super-injunctions and the rights to press freedom seem to be concentrated on tawdry tales whose main purpose is to boost tabloid circulation figures.

• The doors to the York Barbican Centre – open again, after being shamefully padlocked shut for too many years. Now all we need is a return visit from the world’s most musically creative curmudgeon, the great Van Morrison. We go back a bit, Van and I; not that Van knows anything about it. Jools Holland is already booked – and how about opening the doors once more to the provider of my opening quotation?

As for our doors, they should be returning tomorrow, stripped of old paint and ready to hang again. It’s only been a few days but I am missing them already.