Whyfore art thou, Juliet?

Some things in life make no sense.

Having the heating on and opening a window, for example. Diet versions of drinks, when you’re having a burger and fries. Fearne Cotton’s career success. And that most heinous of things – the Juliet Balcony.

I suspect you’re thinking to yourselves, “What has that scruffy oik got against Juliet Balconies? They look nice, let lots of light in, and make a modern property look smart and appealing”. Begrudgingly, I agree with you on these points, but only because I like your shirt.

However, I feel I should counter this with some points that haven’t been covered by the above, purely aesthetic, considerations.

Who thought we needed a door upstairs? True, in days of yore, these were required so that goods could be winched into the upper areas of buildings, but then we invented stairs, and later lifts – we’re really quite clever like that.

Having managed pretty well for thousands of years with boring old windows, we now seem to have an overwhelming desire to put doors in upstairs, as well as the more traditional downstairs, where they’re actually quite useful. Luckily, someone spotted a potentially dangerous flaw in this concept, and decided it might be wise to stick a metal grill in front of the upstairs doors.

Sadly, this allows those from the shallow end of the gene pool to continue breeding, as they are not eliminated by their own stupidity, but I guess the world isn’t perfect, eh?

The downside of this health and safety overreaction is that the doors tend only to open a few inches, thus making them less useful than a window, which you can usually open fairly wide to let plenty or air in, nasty odours out, or lean out of to spy on your neighbours, or shout at children.

Experts are baffled as to why this trend continues. If the idea was to make the less affluent feel like they have a posh balcony on their house, this hasn’t worked very well – the balcony bit is absent, which would seem to be a fairly fundamental flaw in the plan. Was it invented by desperate fabric companies, keen for us to purchase longer curtains and boost their profits? Are double-glazing firms more effective at selling their goods than brick companies?

Maybe it’s simply that we think they look nice, and we didn’t like that cat much anyway.

I suspect the next logical move is to start putting them in roofs too. Before you know it there will be shocking stories of people drowning because they left the roof door open.

The thing that worries me most about Juliet balconies is this – why IS there a handle on the outside?

Have a balcony-filled weekend.

If you can.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 23rd November 2012. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here The paper retitled this one as "Balconies leave me scratching my head". I though my title was quite clever, but what do I know?

This one was submitted well under their word count requirement, but they still edited out 88 words, including the whole cat line. I quite liked that one.

Last week's column actually garnered two comments online! One was sarcastic, and the other one advising me to take up Pilates. You haven't seen me in a leotard. You'd definitely remember it...

(Mike Oldfield still? Yup - Hergest Ridge 2010 Remaster!)

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