“You could have been more careful with your big feet walking up the newly tiled steps,” I said accusingly to Chris, my husband, who had been up for hours before me.

“But I didn’t even walk on the steps… I stayed at the bottom and dragged off the sheets of plastic from there,” Chris answered a little horrified that I could think him so careless, especially after all my hard work the day before.

“Oh, well it wasn’t me,” I said huffily and my mind wandered swiftly to our guest, Roland, who seemed to be the only other likely candidate, considering there was nobody else to blame in our house and Hilda’s place next door (with which we share the lower steps) was empty.

We looked at the damage – several gouges and scuffs, shaped like the toes of shoes, in the still soft new concrete covering the risers of the bottom steps – and we agreed that it could have been worse (it might have been on every step!). At that moment two workmen came out from Hilda’s upstairs front door and the penny dropped… over breakfast a little earlier I had noticed, from our kitchen window, the same workmen going in through the bottom – accessed by the shared steps.

It began to rain yet again so Chris and I replaced the large sheets of plastic across the new tiles with their soft grout and risers.

“I had better make a sign for the workmen and put it at the top of the steps – DANGER OF DEATH ~ YOU COULD BE MORTARFIED!” Chris laughed.

(And shh! Please don’t tell Roland that he was under suspicion – he would be mortified!)