Upstairs Downstairs.

My lovely wife has a phobia. It's not one of those that affect your quality of life, more of a minor inconvenience. She is claustrophobic and won't go in lifts or travel on the underground; she doesn't like caves or tight spaces which is a shame as I quite like caves. She is a game girl and will always make the effort when visiting tourist attractions but sometimes we have to beat a hasty retreat when it becomes too much for her. The main issue is that she won't go in lifts and, as a consequence, I have become an expert on stairs.  

Humping our luggage up and down flights of stairs seems to be a feature of our holidays. It's not too bad if we are on a lower floor but when you have to climb to the fourth floor or above it can become a bit tiresome. I generally request a lower floor but it's not always provided. Just recently we stayed at a hotel and were faced with a choice of a second floor room kitted out for the disabled or a standard room on the seventh floor. We ended up in the room for the disabled as we couldn't face seven flights of stairs; mind you the shower room was big enough to get a football team in.

Alternatively, I could go up in the lift, put the bags in the room, get the lift back down and then walk up with her but that seems the long way round and I would have to carry her bags as well. I am too much of a gentleman to let her walk up on her own and I would worry that she would get lost. I can imagine us wandering the corridors like dispossessed ghosts looking for each other so it seems easier to just bite the bullet and stagger up the stairs with our bags. It's surprising how many times a day you go backwards and forwards to your room, with or without bags, and it's especially annoying when you have forgotten something and then have to go back up to get it.

Multi- storey car parks are to be avoided where possible. Nothing smells quite like the concrete staircase of a car park with its bouquet of urine, vomit and dankness, sometimes with the added hazards of dodgy lighting and winos to climb over. Hospital staircases, whilst smelling much nicer, have the inconvenience of long meandering corridors to negotiate. On one memorable occasion we visited a sick relative on the 11th floor of Hampstead Hospital; I thought were going to have to send out for additional oxygen.

You would think that with all those stairs we would both be thin as whippets but that's not the case unfortunately. I don't really mind not going in lifts, who wants to be crammed in a tin can with the great unwashed anyway.