There was a knock at my door. I looked at the my watch. 11 o'clock. I wasn't expecting anyone. The postman had already been. I stood up from the computer desk in my home office and headed downstairs to the front door
My elderly neighbour, Di, stood there with a hopeful smile on her face
"Hello, Di," I said lightly. "What can I do for you?"
"Oh, I'm really sorry to bother you, Chris," she replied, " but I can't get my computer to come on and I wondered if you could take a look at it for me?
I nodded. "Yeah, well, I'm not an expert, but I'll come along and see if I can help. Give me a few minutes to finish what I'm doing. I'll be there shortly."
She gave me a relieved smile. "Oo, thanks so much. I didn't know what to do. I'll see you in a bit then." She turned away and disappeared down the path towards her house.
I'd known Di for twenty years, ever since we'd moved to the village. We lived at opposite ends of a terrace of six houses, and I passed her house every day as I walked to the car park. She had been widowed some three or four years previously. Her husband, Alan, had been a rather surly character, not really very sociable, and my wife and I had not had a lot to do with them. Since his death, though, Di had been a lot friendlier and we often stopped to chat if she was in her front garden as we passed.
She was about seventy, quite short, with shoulder length grey hair, going silvery. I guessed that in her younger days she would have had been quite slim, and though she had spread in the usual places, gone a bit dumpy, she had a good figure for her age.
I returned to my office (I worked from home a couple of days a week), completed and saved the document I was working on, then back downstairs, where I slipped on a pair of shoes, locked the door behind me, and walked the short distance to Di's house.
She saw me through the window as I came through her garden gate. The door opened before I could ring the bell.
"Oh Chris," she said, "I'm so sorry to bother you. It's really good of you to come." She laid a hand on my arm.
"That's ok Di. It's no bother. Show me to the problem."
"It's upstairs in the little bedroom. You go on up, I'll come behind you.
As I approached the stairs I looked around. I'd never been in her house before. It was more or less identical to mine, though the layout was reversed. But it was much neater and less cluttered then our house. At the top of stairs was a small bedroom, a box room really, in the same place where my office was at home. The door was half open and I went in, she following behind me.
There was little in the room. A tall cupboard against one wall, a desk beneath the window and a chair. On the desk was a laptop, quite an old one, which was opened up, displaying the dreaded 'blue screen of death'.
"I turned it on this morning," she told me, "but nothing came on. Just this blue screen".
"Have you tried restarting it?" I enquired.
"Well I didn't know what to do. I unplugged it, but it stayed on."
"Yeah," I answered. "We'll have to take the battery out to restart it."
I pulled out the chair and sat down, removed the mains lead, then, turning the laptop over, released the catch and pulled out the battery. As I was doing this Di moved closer, standing right up against me with a hand on my shoulder. I found it quite disconcerting. She didn't seem to notice.
"This is really good of you" she repeated.
"No worries, Di. I'll get my reward in Heaven," I joked.