stephdiary wrote yesterday about having been pestered by a ‘God-botherer’, as he put it, while stuck on a broken-down train. It's obviously the weekend for it: this morning I heard beckyc's doorbell ring downstairs, and shortly afterwards my own doorbell rang. On the way to answer it I decided it was most likely Jehovah's Witnesses or similar, since they seemed the most plausible people to be going door-to-door on a Sunday morning; and sure enough, when I looked out of the window above my door, there were two people waving a ‘tract’ (their own word) at me entitled ‘All Suffering Soon To End’.

I get a lot of mileage out of that little window. For those who haven't visited me: I live in a first-floor flat with internal stairs down to my own front door at ground level. One of the hall windows is directly above the front door. So when my doorbell rings and my fifth sense tells me it's an unwelcome door-to-door pesterer of some kind rather than someone I actually want to see, I don't bother going down to the door; I just open that window and ask what they want from up here, saving me the effort of going down and up the stairs and also protecting me from any attempts to get a physical or psychological foot in the door.

That said, I would actually quite have liked to have talked to them on this occasion. Owen's comment yesterday had reminded me of the fundamental curiosity I always feel about proactive religious evangelists of this nature, and I've never yet managed to actually ask one about it. Sadly, when I do encounter one it never quite seems to be the right time; in this case I was half way through my breakfast and it would have gone soggy if I'd left it too long, so I just said ‘no thanks’ and shut the window again.

( the description of my fundamental curiosity gets a bit long )