Jonola14

CHAIRS AND LADDERS

After I’d defrosted the car, driven to work in the freezing cold, slipped on an icy pathway and, after three hours of being at work, finally put my jumper on the right way round, I concluded that the cold was here to stay. “The Russian freeze” someone said to me, sparking me into asking why it didn’t bloody stay in Russia but it’s here and it looks like it’s going to be here for a little while longer.

The day came and went, the sun and what little heat it generated soon disappeared and night time descended once more as I ambled through the front door to my dark, empty flat by a noisy London crossroads. So I sat down to my computer and whiled away the next couple of hours on various projects and several hundred emails. But there was an interruption. It sounded like the banging of doors downstairs, or the sudden closing of a window but it kept repeating and repeating. A very odd sound, almost like someone knocking on something time and time again and it eventually disturbed me so much I got up to investigate.

I passed the window at the top of the stairs and despite the reflection in the glass from the light in the hallway, something caught my eye. I ducked down below the window sill and crouched my way back to the light switch where I extinguished the light and hid myself in a doorway. There was a man with a ladder at next door’s window. Bearing in mind that this is the end of January, the “Russian freeze” is here, it’s eight pm and very dark, it struck me as a very odd occurrence.

The banging I had heard was the ladder knocking against next door’s upstairs window and as the noise was continuing, I crept forward from my pitch black doorway and peeked out the window to see what was going on. There was a man there, that was for sure and he was making his way out of next door’s flat, that was also a given. But he was making his way UP. Yes, UP. Onto the roof. There was no balaclava or bag of swag, or even a sense of quiet or urgency, just a man climbing out of a third floor flat in the depths of winter and in the middle of a cold spell.

But that wasn’t the oddest part, that was yet to come. I was intrigued by this whole situation and had by now prised myself away from my concealment and stuck my face to the window, trying to catch a glimpse of what happened next. Within seconds I had my reward. The man on the ladder grabbed a chair from somewhere inside the flat and took it up the ladder with him. He took a chair up a ladder and onto the roof. Quite why anyone would wish to do this on such a bitterly cold night I do not know, but this character decided that he wanted some quiet time up on the roof.

By this point I had assumed that it was actually my neighbour on the ladder and not some burglar, but the reasons for carrying out such a bizarre act continue to puzzle me. Is this man a keen star gazer? Judging by the number of emergency services sirens that blare away all day and all night, he can’t have been going up there for the peace and quiet, so why was he going up a ladder onto the roof with a chair? Maybe he wanted to smoke something illegal and not leave the smell in the flat, maybe he wanted to see the local sights from a half decent vantage point, or maybe he just wanted to practise escaping up a ladder… either way, it’s a mystery to me but as I have been writing this, the banging has restarted which I can only assume to be the noisy product of his descent.

Strange neighbourhood this one…