Midstairs

The underdog so often loses out, doesn’t it? Poor underdog. Take the midstairs for example. That’s right, midstairs. We keep referring to the upstairs or downstairs in everyday discourse when informing others of where we might be going or what we’re doing. Such as, “I’m going upstairs to bed, see you in the morning”. Or (speaking to your wife), “I just accidently pushed your mother downstairs. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to breathing.”

Upstairs and downstairs are helpful, practical adverbial expressions in the usual sense (they can also function as a noun or adjective – but that’s a story for another day). That’s all very well. But what about poor old midstairs? It never – or hardly – gets a look in, does it? It should. Why not? Well, think about it. I mean if there was no midstairs no one would be able to get upstairs or go downstairs in the first place. You wouldn’t be getting the sleep you needed because you couldn’t reach your bed – at least for those of us with our bedroom all the way upstairs. And, possibly, you’d not have finally gotten rid of your mother-in-law, obtaining all the joy of watching her free-fall tumbling to a thumping death at the bottom of the stairwell in the process.

So, sorry, there’s just no escaping it. You have to necessarily traverse midstairs to reach either downstairs or upstairs. The midstairs is the crucial bit joining the two opposite ends together, a seamless bridge that you don’t even notice or normally give a second thought to. Without it you’d be stranded down the bottom or up the top with no way to reach the other side. Doomed with no foreseeable way to get back. Like the Star Trek gang on some weird where-the-hell-are-we-and-how-did-we-get-stranded-here? episode. Come to think of it, without midstairs we could never really have an upstairs or downstairs in the first place. Then what would we all do? Keep travelling and going places and meeting only on the horizontal plane? Relocating our bedrooms downstairs? Disposing of our mother-in-laws only by non-vertical means? Just think of the implications and how limiting and inconvenient this would be.

The midstairs. I wholly embrace it. I’m rooting for its linguistic relevance and subsequent usage. See you midstairs sometime as you make your merry way either upstairs or downstairs.