A DRUNKEN man tried to climb through a family's living room window after following a young woman home from work, a court heard.

Mamta Patel was working at the Tesco Express store on Bradford Street on July 24 last year when she noticed the man dressed in shorts and a vest, Bolton magistrates heard.

When she finished her shift, 20-year-old Miss Patel headed to her home in Radcliffe Road, Darcy Lever, but noticed the man, later identified as 33-year-old Alastair Waring, following her.

Inside her semi-detached house Miss Patel and her father locked the front door and saw Waring standing outside looking at the property.

"He then walks up the pathway, bangs on the door and shouts through the letter box, 'open the door, it's the police,'" said Steve Woodman, prosecuting.

Waring started repeating random strings of numbers and the family were so frightened that Miss Patel rang her mother, who was due home from work herself, to tell her to enter the house through the back door.

When the Patels opened their living room door a few minutes later they found Waring had managed to open a front bay window and was climbing inside.

"He had got half his body into the house," said Mr Woodman.

The Patels pushed him outside, where he damaged a garden fence and crushed a hydrangea which had been planted 40 years earlier by the neighbour's late husband.

Police attended and initially arrested Waring for attempted burglary.

He was due to stand trial on Thursday for a public order offence, but changed his plea to guilty the same day.

Stephen Teasdale, defending, said Waring had become an alcoholic after losing his job and had drunk a bottle of vodka on the day of the offence after suffering relationship problems.

He described the incident as "an apparently bizarre event" which Waring can remember nothing of.

Waring, of Ledbury Close, Eccleston, St Helens, has now found a job and is attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Magistrates sentenced him to do 50 hours unpaid work and pay a total of £550 compensation, £100 towards prosecution costs and a £60 victim surcharge.