For the last few months it has been very difficult to close the door to my flat without giving it an almighty slam, or indeed to open it from the inside without a hefty barge of the shoulder. I'm not exactly sure of the cause, but something has been done in the name of the basement conversion happening in the flat below that has twisted the door frame slightly and means that the door no longer really fits the hole allocated to it.

Opening the door from the outside is even more of a challenge, because one has to put the key in the Yale lock, turn it, and then execute a very specific pulling manoeuvre which requires just the right combination of force and consistency. Too gentle or too jerky and the door sticks halfway open; too hard and you risk snapping the key off in the lock.

I've mentioned this to The Baron a number of times, but despite multiple promises to resolve the matter, for many weeks my entrances have resembled a scene from Ocean's 11 and my exits like something out of an old episode of The Sweeney.

However, this afternoon The Baron arrived with a rather scared looking carpenter introduced to me as 'Josef'.

"Hello Josef" I said.

"Don't bother," said The Baron, "he doesn't speak English".

(Okay, so he doesn't understand a two-word sentence, half of which is his own name, the other half of which is the most basic greeting in the country in which he finds himself...?)

Various gestures were made towards the door and within seconds Josef's power tools were out. The Baron assured me the job would be finished within the hour and it looked like the carpenter had been told (or at least thought) he'd never see his wife and kids again if the job took any longer than that.

I left them to it and within 45 minutes I was being called down to inspect the handiwork. Now, to Josef's credit, the door did now close with great ease. However, the price for this improvement was a new gap underneath the door big enough for a small burglar to crawl under. Not that such a burglar would have to resort to crawling because the gap between the side of the door and the frame was now big enough to make the lock mechanism vulnerable to the most primitive of tools — a coat-hanger would definitely be overkill.

I explained to The Baron that while the jamming door was certainly annoying, it did at least still function as a door from a security perspective. Following the efforts of the terrified Josef, important aspects of its very doorness had now been eroded. Granted, it still operated from an aesthetic perspective perfectly happily as a door, but from the perspective of a barrier to unwanted visitors it left quite a lot to be desired.

The Baron reluctantly agreed but said that it would have to be fixed another time because Josef had to leave for another job. That job presumably being the task of digging up his wife and young family before their oxygen ran out.

After they left, I stood in the hallway, closed the flat door and took a few steps back to assess just how obvious the two new gaps were from a distance. It turns out they were really rather obvious.

Just as I'd resigned myself to a door that now only offered protection from burglary as long as the burglars were overweight and had no tools to hand, a sudden draught came under the front door and my flat door popped open of its own accord.

Okay, so I'm safe from chubby, tool-deficient burglars as long as they are also very impatient...