When is late too late?

Is visiting at 9:43pm too late?

I am an "early to bed, early to rise" sort of cat. Even as a teenager I did not want to lie in bed. Most of my adult life I have had to be up and about early, often very early indeed. When you work on a global time scale rather than a local one you do not have the "luxury" of late nights and late mornings. 

I don't do as many of the 4am starts as I once did but the early to bed habit will probably be with me for the rest of my life. I also like to read in bed before I turn the light out.

So, last night I was tucked up in bed reading the next chapter in the latest library book and the door bell rang. It was 9:43pm. Who on earth would be calling at that hour? It had to be some sort of emergency or the police with bad news or....

It was cold out of bed too. I went to the door but did not open it. I called out. Someone walked off rapidly. It was all a little disturbing but I thought of two more possibilities. One was that it was my Chinese neighbour. He keeps distinctly odd hours as he makes his money by playing the international stock markets. He would not even be aware of what the actual time was perhaps - or not until he had already rung the bell. The other possibility was that someone had mistaken this house for a unit of the same number in the "court" opposite. That seemed more likely.

I still don't know. My Chinese neighbour might turn up this morning but a stranger visiting the court will not. 

I am trying not to think about the third possibility - that someone may think the house is empty.

All of this makes me wonder about visiting hours and when it is polite and proper to call on people or phone them. When do you do it? I try to keep phone calls before 8pm and visits even earlier. It depends on the person I want to speak to when I might call them in the morning. Later than 8pm feels like an intrusion of their privacy. Perhaps I am wrong. I don't know - and I still don't know who rang the doorbell.