Back door warning

I would steal him and leave your purse where it was!

What a ravening scary beast Anya!

He's great at tripping people up as he often likes to sleep on the back door mat.

What you need is a guard dog - like mine!

I've had that happen to me and didn't even realise at the time. I couldnt find my purse one morning and knew I'd popped out to the shop the previous afternoon so thought it must be in the car or I'd left it on the counter of the wee shop but there was no sign of it anywhere.

When I reported the loss to my bank I was told to get a police report number so off I trotted to the station still thinking I'd lost the purse.

The officer asked me to tell him exactly what I had done when I came home from the shop and at that moment I remembered that I'd dropped my purse in the kitchen and as it wasn't properly closed I had to pick up coins from the floor and then put my purse on the kitchen table. Bingo!
Apparently this is exactly what the majority of women do, come in through the back door, put keys/bag/purse on table/breakfast bar, head upstairs or into another room. Opportunistic thief is in and out before you can blink.

I locked the door after me for quite a long time after that but I have got a bit lax of late.

I do lock the back door usually but it is annoying to have to keep unlocking it to pop outside. There was a time when I would go up and have a shower with the patio doors left open in the Summer time but I guess times have changed..
We do have 6' fences around our garden and the garden gate is padlocked shut so its not easy to get into but I once found the window cleaner cleaning the back windows even though I'd forgotten to unlock the gate for him, when I asked him how he got in, he said I just climbed up the ladder onto the garage roof and down the other side... since then I've always locked the back door unless I'm in the garden.

We always take the key out of the back door. For one thing, if one of us was here alone and had an accident the other one wouldn't be able to use their key to get in (if there was a key already in the lock)

I keep the back door locked when DH is not here. When he is here we lock it when we go onto the living room. It's just so annoying to have to keep unlocking it just to pop out to the bin or whatever. Guess it's probably good advice though.

It is also worth paying as much attention to the locks on your back door as the ones at the front. A neighbour came home just after dusk and couldn't open her front door. After a few tries she went round the back, to find her back door wide open. It had been broken into by someone who had broken the window beside it and reached in to turn the key that she had locked but left in the door. They had then jammed the front door to give them time to run out the back when they heard her arrive home.