I have no cameras. She has one, pointed at her own path, and my front window is at the edge of her frame. Fourteen times in three years there is somebody in my front room with the lights off.
I do not have a camera. I have never wanted one and after all this I want one less.
The woman next door has one over her front door. It looks down her path towards the road, which is what they all do, and because our houses are staggered slightly, the left hand quarter of her picture is my front bay window.
She shares clips. Not obsessively: she is in her seventies, she likes the thing, and about once a fortnight there is a video of a fox or a cat or a courier, sent to me with a message like "look at the state of this one".
I have three years of those on my phone. Perhaps four hundred.
In fourteen of them there is a person in my front room.
The front room is unlit in all fourteen. The camera sees into it because the streetlight outside my house is on the far side of the road and it throws a bit of light through the bay.
What you see is a shape passing behind the glass, left to right or right to left, about half of it visible over the sill.
It takes between one and two seconds to cross. It is a person's height and it moves the way a person moves.
I was in the house for eleven of the fourteen. Upstairs, asleep, at the times on the timestamps.
For the other three I was not in the country. One is a Tuesday in the October I was in Portugal and two are from a week in Wales in 2023.
Nobody else has a key. My son has one, and he lives in Newcastle, and the three I was away for I have checked with him because I could not not, and he was at work in Newcastle on all three, and it was an awkward conversation and he was very good about it.
Why I did not simply ask her.
I did, once, in the first year, before I had counted them. I said something like, is that somebody in my front room, and she took the phone off me and looked at it and said she could not see anything and that her eyes were not what they were.
She was not being evasive. She genuinely could not see it. It is at the edge of the frame, it is dark, and it is a second and a half long on a phone screen held by a woman of seventy six.
And after that I did not want to be the man next door who keeps asking her to look at shapes in her videos.
What I have done instead.
I have the clips, because she sent them, and they sit in a chat on my phone.
I have watched them on a proper screen. A television, the laptop, and once, in a shop, on a monitor, which I do not recommend as an experience.
They are compressed and small and the shape has no face and no detail and no clothing you could name. What it has is a top of a head, shoulders, and the movement.
I put four of them next to a clip I made myself, which was me walking across my own front room in the dark at eleven at night while the camera next door was running, and I asked her for that clip the next day and said I had been checking whether my new lamp was too bright.
Mine looks like theirs. The same height in the frame, the same speed, the same amount of the shape over the sill.
Which means whatever it is, it is walking on my floor, at my floor level, and it is about my height.
The times.
Nine of the fourteen are between 03:00 and 03:40.
Three are in the early evening, around seven, which is worse, because at seven I am usually in that room.
I have checked those three against what I was doing. All three are evenings I was out: two at my daughter's and one at the doctor's.
Two are in the afternoon.
The direction.
I did this because I had run out of anything else to do and because you can, with a table and a bit of patience.
Eight of them go left to right. Six go right to left.
In my front room, left to right as the camera sees it is from the door to the fireplace, and right to left is the other way.
They do not pair up. There is no clip where it goes one way and then back a minute later, and there is no clip of it arriving or leaving.
It is only ever a crossing.
What I have changed.
I keep the curtains shut in the front room now. All the time, day and night, which my daughter has commented on twice.
It has made no difference to how many clips there are, and that is the thing I have not been able to get past, because with the curtains shut the camera cannot see into that room at all.
The last two are since I started doing it.
You cannot see the room. What you can see is the curtains, which are heavy and lined and which I chose for that, and in both of them the curtains move.
Not blowing. There is no draught in that bay and I have had the window checked.
They move the way curtains move when somebody has just walked past them on the inside, and then they hang still.