When dinner is done, the dinner bell is rung. It has a wonderfully deep sound that carries well through the house. But it doesn’t do well through closed doors. Neither does my voice.

I used to go upstairs to knock on Ingrid’s door to call her to dinner, but that got tiring quite quickly. Especially when the answer I got was in the vein of “I’ll be down soon, I just have to win this battle”. Not only did I do the work of cooking dinner – I then had to chase down people to come and eat it.

The obvious, practical solution to this was a pair of remote-operated doorbells. The buttons are downstairs in the kitchen, next to the singing bowl. The bells themselves are upstairs in Ingrid’s and Adrian’s rooms. They each chose their own ringtones. One sounds like a bunch of birds tweeting; the other is a more traditional melody. Sort of like 19th-century servants’ bells, but the other way round.

Mostly the bells mean “dinner is ready”, but not always. Today Ingrid rang Adrian’s bell when she wanted him to bring down the iPad (that normally “lives” downstairs but is often “forgotten” upstairs) and had sore leg muscles from gym class. Snarky comments were exchanged, both about “forgetting” the iPad, and about using the bell instead of walking.