Holy Jesus Fucking Christ What the Fuck Are You Doing In My House You Bastard?

With these words, I greeted the stranger who let himself into our home in the middle of the night, and set up camp in my 4-year-old daughter's bedroom.

Didi came into our room. It's 4 in the morning, and she says there's a man in her bedroom. I get up, feeling vulnerable in boxer shorts and tee-shirt, but don't take the time to pull on some tracksuit bottoms. It seems more urgent than that. I turn on the light in her room, and, sure enough, her quilt has been mostly pulled off her bed, and is covering a lump on the floor.

Cautiously peeling back the quilt, I reveal a youngish man, clearly not a vagrant, mid-20s, medium build. I scream at him, B screams at him. He seems confused, disoriented (you think?). He gets up, picks up his shoes, and I take him downstairs to the door. He's wearing a tee-shirt, it's the middle of the night, cold outside. Inappropriately dressed much? I ask if he had a coat. He says he does.

While I go back to fetch his thin leather jacket, my wife tackles him on the subject of what the hell he thought he was doing in our house. She twigs that he is the son of the woman who previously lived there, though we know for a fact that her son was not living with her at the time she sold the house (he was living with his dad).

Turns out the front door was unlocked, which I blame myself for, as I had a slightly different house-to-bed routine the night before.

So now we're lying in bed, shocked to full wakefulness, and take an hour to drift back to sleep, with Didi between us for comfort. At 5.30, footsteps on the stairs. HE'S BACK!

This time, we know we locked the fucking door, so how did he get in? He's as confused as disoriented as ever; not smelling of drink, but clearly stoned out of his gourd on something.

He still has a key. To our house. On his key-ring. For the last 3 months? Wha?

So I didn't leave the door unlocked. We threw him out again, and that was that for sleeping - that night, and the night after. In the morning, B wanted to phone the police, but I suggested she phone his mother because I suspected that she and her ex-husband between them will give him a harder time about this than the police ever would. She reported to us that he used to be a bit of a stoner till the day he fell out of a window and broke his neck in 3 places. So they thought he'd left "all that" behind him.

My personal opinion is that nobody in their right mind gets that stoned - to forget where you live, to not have any memory about what you did when you wake up the next day. I think to get that far-out you've got to be quite far out to start with. I generally don't like to be around such people.

I don't know if I'll ever sleep again, and I wonder how long it'll be before Didi sleeps through the night in her own room again. We downplayed the incident to her. Told her it was a "boy" (though he's 27) who was the "little boy" of the woman who used to live there. So to Didi he's a "naughty boy" and part of the game of "naughty boy in the room."

Fuck.