The camera only records when something moves. It recorded him for six hours in one unbroken clip, which means he never stopped moving, and in the footage he does not move at all.
I put the doorbell in because of parcels.
That is the whole of my reason and I want it on the record, because when you tell people something like this they start looking for a reason you were watching your own front door, and there is not one. Two things got taken off the step in a month and my sister said get one of the ring ones, they are forty quid, and I got one of the ring ones and it was forty quid.
It works the way they all work.
There is a battery and a camera and a motion sensor. The camera is not running all the time, because it would flatten the battery in a day. It sits there doing nothing until the sensor sees movement in front of it, and then it wakes up, records, and keeps recording for as long as it keeps seeing movement, and stops a few seconds after the movement stops.
That is important and I will say it once more plainly. It records while something is moving. It stops when nothing is.
My longest clip before March was thirty eight seconds. That was a courier having an argument on the phone on my step.
The clip from the eleventh of March is six hours and four minutes.
It starts at 11.52 at night and it ends at 5.56 in the morning.
I did not know it existed for two days. The app tells you about clips when you have notifications on and I do not, because the road gets a lot of foxes and it was going off eleven times a night. So it sat there in the history, a bar in a list, longer than all the others put together.
I found it on the Thursday because I was looking for a delivery.
The whole of it is one shot of my front door from the usual angle, which is slightly wide and slightly fisheye, taking in the step, the bit of path, the recycling bin and about two feet of the neighbour's fence.
There is a man on the step.
He is standing square on to the door, close to it, about the distance you stand when you have rung and you are waiting. Ordinary height. A dark coat, and I have looked at that coat for a long time and it is a coat, it is not a costume or a robe or anything, it is a wool overcoat of the kind that half the men in this country own.
His arms are at his sides.
The camera sees him in infrared, so it is that grey nightvision picture, and his back is to the camera because the camera is above the door and he is facing it. You see the back and shoulders of a man, and the top of his head, and one hand at each side.
He does not move.
Let me put that precisely, because it is the whole of the thing.
I have gone through that clip at quarter speed. I have taken stills from it and put them side by side. I have loaded it into a video editor my nephew uses and lined frames up on top of each other.
There is drift, in the way that a compressed video has drift, where the noise moves and the encoder redraws things slightly. If you flick between two frames a minute apart, the grain shifts.
The man does not.
His hands are in the same place at midnight and at half past four. The fold in the shoulder of the coat, the one that a coat gets from a hanger, is in the same place. Nothing about him settles or sways or shifts weight, and a person cannot stand for six hours, but even if a person could stand for six hours, a person sways. You sway when you queue. It is not something you decide.
And here is the part that I keep going round.
If nothing was moving, the camera should have stopped.
I rang the company.
I got a lad in a call centre who was perfectly pleasant and who told me that the recording length is capped, and I said what is the cap, and he went and found out and came back and said the maximum clip length on my model is one hundred and twenty seconds.
Two minutes.
He said it firmly and he said it twice and he offered to send me the specification, and he did send me the specification, and it says on page four that the maximum event recording duration is 120 seconds.
I said I have a clip that is three hundred and sixty four minutes long.
He asked me to hold and I held for eleven minutes, and when he came back he had somebody else with him, and the somebody else asked me for the device ID and the timestamp and said they would look into it, and asked me not to delete it.
Nobody ever came back to me.
I chased it four times over two months. The last time the ticket had been closed with the resolution field filled in, and the resolution field said: no fault found with device.
I still have the clip. It is downloaded onto two hard drives and it is in my email to myself and it is on a memory stick in a drawer, because I have had a bad feeling since March about it only existing in one place.
The last four minutes are the only part where anything happens.
At 5.52 in the morning the light changes. That is just dawn. You can see the picture come off infrared and go to colour, and the greys turn into the actual colours of my actual path, and the man is still there and now he is in colour, in a navy overcoat.
At 5.54 there is a noise.
There is no audio on the clips on my plan, which I have always thought was a swindle, so I do not mean a noise I heard. I mean that at 5.54 the man's head turns, slightly, to his left, in the way a head turns when somebody has heard something down the road. It is the first movement in six hours and it is about fifteen degrees.
At 5.55 he steps back off the step.
He does it normally. He steps back and down onto the path, and he turns, and for one and a half seconds you see his face.
I am not going to be able to give you what you want here.
The camera is 1080p and it is a fisheye and he is four feet from it at an upward angle in dawn light, and I have blown it up and sharpened it and I have paid an actual person on an actual website eighteen pounds to do it properly, and the answer is a man of somewhere between forty and sixty with a broad face.
It is not somebody I know.
The eighteen pound man sent it back with a note saying it was a clean enough source and did I want him to do anything else, and I said no thank you.
He walks out of shot to the left, towards the main road, at a normal pace.
The clip ends at 5.56 when the motion stops.
There is one more thing and then I am done.
I said the camera only records when it sees movement, and that a still man should not have kept it awake for six hours.
There is a second sensor in it. It is not a motion sensor. It is the one that decides whether the person in front of the door is a person, and it is what stops the foxes waking you up, and on my model you can turn it on and off, and mine was on.
The device log is a text export you can request and I requested it.
For the eleventh of March, between 11.52 and 5.56, there are one thousand four hundred and sixty entries, one every fifteen seconds, and every one of them is the same line.
person detected
Fifteen seconds apart. For six hours. Because every fifteen seconds it looked, and every fifteen seconds it saw a person, and a camera that can see a person cannot be told that there is nothing there.
That is what kept it awake.
Not movement. Presence.