My Dosser

Extract

I live in a basement flat in Central London. Three years ago I opened my front door and found a woman asleep outside. She seemed about 55-years-old. I had never seen her before. Since then she has used this area for sleeping purposes and has slowly acquired prescriptive rights over my doorstep and over the disused coke cellar adjacent to it (where she stores her possessions). Before she turned up on my doorstep she had tried sleeping in several other doorways in the vicinity, but my neighbours are all, to varying degrees, afraid of her. She is only a small woman, weighing perhaps 8 stone and rather frail, so clearly she represents no physical danger, but her strangeness may put people in mind of a witch.