This is something of an unusual question, one you may have difficulty in answering and probably one you have never been asked before.

Are yours hung on the left or the right? Mine are hung on the left though I have a friend who has one hung on the left and one on the right.

I'm talking about doors, of course, and until this week I had never given a thought to which way they were hung.

Doors were just the things you opened or closed - or slammed when you wanted to get your point across.

Then I went to buy a new door and it changed my entire perspective in minutes.

Now there are some things in life you need and others you get and in my experience they are rarely one and the same.

What I need right now is a holiday - two weeks basking in the Florida sun would be great. Or just a weekend being pampered in a luxury health spa would do.

Instead, I am getting a door and a back door at that.

Oh, it's a nice enough door. It has, according to the showroom description, "a security glazed panel, obscure glass and a five-point locking system".

It will undoubtedly become a subject of discussion when I have visitors and could even be a selling point, adding thousands to the value of my property, whenever I decide to move ...

This door is also a left-handed door, which will be hung on the left, when it finally arrives. Unfortunately it had to be specially ordered.

It's not that there weren't plenty of similar doors in stock when a friend and I ventured inside one of those vast hangar-like DIY stores in Hove.

There were lots of doors and some even had impressive sounding names, like the elegant Burghley and the stately Colonial. But they all had one thing in common - they had to be hung on the right.

Does it really matter whether my back door is hung on the left or on the right? It most certainly does.

Fling open a right-handed back door and it will pin me, or whoever is washing up at the time, against the kitchen sink.

A few run-ins like that and your backside would be black and blue. Who would believe you when you took your bruises to casualty and blamed an abusive back door for your injuries?

"You were a long time," said The Mother when I finally reappeared from my morning's door hunting.

I told her the problems I had encountered. She was amazed.

"Which way is the front door hung then?" she asked.

I checked. "It's a left-hander like the one at the back," I said.

"But is that coming in or going out?" she asked.

I checked again. "Coming in," I told her.

"So if you're going out, it's hung on the right? Right," she said slyly.

"Stop it! You're trying to confuse me," I said.

All this, however, has certainly made me look at doors with new eyes as I walk down the street. No longer do I notice whether the paintwork is red, or blue or green, or whether there's a letterbox in the middle or at the base.

And I never look to see if there's a doorbell or a brass knocker, or even if the number is odd or even. I check, instead, to see which way it's hung.

It may seem trivial to most of you but for me, you see, it has become something of a hanging matter, no less.