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Earlier this year I was getting ready to head out to work when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to see a young woman backing rapidly away while talking to me through her mask. She was out-of-sorts maybe not sober maybe upset, I didn't think I'd seen her before (but I have poor facial recognition skills and regularly blank old friends in the street). 

What with the mask and the distance she had put between us and her distress and my confusion, it took a while to understand that she was asking to borrow a ladder because she was trying to get into a flat in the house next door and her key wasn't working. I live in a row of tall old houses which have a storey below the front pavement level.  Spear-tipped railings  along the front of the houses protect people on the pavement from falling 20 foot into this cellar well. 

The woman wanted access to the first floor flat and had a mad plan of balancing the ladder from the railings, across the deep drop and up to the windowsill of the flat that she wanted access to.

She looked a bit frail. I always seem to think I am obliged to do everything that is asked of me so I realised that I couldn't just hand over the ladder, I'd have to do the death-balancing thing and the breaking-in thing because somehow whatever befell her would be my responsibility.

To stall, I stayed at the door listening while she kept talking, going over her story and I realised that I wasn't convinced - had she been locked out by a dastardly lover or was she a burglar with an unusual MO? maybe her story was a bit true - there was definitely something else going on and I really didn't want to pull on that thread. I said I didn't have a ladder and suggested she find a locksmith, I wished her luck and continued on out to work, the image and the mystery of her went with me.

Last week I answered the door to a woman asking to borrow my ladder to gain access to her flat because 'her key wouldn't work', she was the same sort of age and hair type as the first woman but this woman said she lived in the basement flat I remembered chatting with her through the hedge in the summer when we were both outside gardening but we were hidden from each other by all the leafiness, I remembered she was called Martha and Martha's plan was to lower my ladder over the railings into the basement, her boyfriend would climb down and hope he could access though there. I gave her the ladder, the boyfriend tried, failed and was stuck in the cellar until a locksmith came.

Yesterday afternoon I answered the door to a young man in a towelling bath robe. He wanted to borrow my ladder to get into the first floor flat - he had locked himself out. His plan was a lot better than the first woman - he said that he had no idea who she might have been, he seemed sober and he knew Martha, Martha had told him that I had a great ladder and would hand it over to anyone who asked for it.