THERE’S nothing quite like being rudely awoken at 3am by the sound of a burglar alarm going off. It’s even worse when you realise with a start that it’s your burglar alarm.

“Is there someone downstairs’ hissed the housemate as I crept across the landing.

“How do I know?” I replied. “I’m up here with you…but at least if there are burglars down there, they know we’re awake now!”

“I’d check the video on the doorbell but it’s on charge in the living room so it’ll only show the back of the chair,” she continued, renewing my faith in her ability to keep the house secure.

“I’ll go down and look,” I announced bravely, reasonably sure there was no movement on the lower floor.

“Take this,” she said handing me a coat hanger.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked with my eyes open as wide as is possible in the middle of the night. “Give them somewhere to put their Balaclava?”

“You could hit them with it,” she whispered back.

“I’ll give it a miss thank you,” I replied heading down the stairs.

After a quick look around and a flash of disappointment that nobody had broken in and tackled the previous night’s dirty dishes, I checked out the burglar alarm.

“It’s ok.It’s the battery,” I shouted up the stairs.

“Switch it off at the fuse box,” replied the housemate helpfully.

“It’s the battery,” I shouted, less than patient in the wee small hours. “The battery that’s there as a back up for when the electricity fails!”

Minutes later with the alarm silenced I headed back up to bed and while the housemate gently snored, I struggled to get back to sleep, just about managing it only to find the house once again filled with the wailing of the burglar alarm.

“I’ll go shall I?” I snarled rhetorically at the still slumbering housemate.

By the time my alarm went off at 7am I had been up every hour on the hour to silence the alarm and my temper was frazzled to say the least.

“Thank goodness it was only the bit that goes off inside the house,” said the refreshed housemate as I told her about the drama she had managed to sleep through. “At least we didn’t keep the neighbours awake!”

“ The neighbours? It didn’t even keep you awake!” I snapped, getting ever closer to the end of my exhausted tether as the alarm once again burst into life.

Later in the day as called in on The Mother, the housemate smothered a yawn.

“You look tired,” said The Mother.

“I am,” said the housemate. “We had a very disturbed night!”

“We did what?” I asked in amazement.

“When I checked one half of this ‘we’ was snoring her head off while the other half was trotting up and downstairs to sort the alarm.

“It’s a good job nobody called the police,” said The Mother.

“I was thinking that,” I replied, recalling the incident a few years back when a helpful midnight passerby mistook a flickering solar light for a burglar alarm and dialled 999. With sirens and blue lights blazing the enthusiastic officers who attended took some convincing that they hadn’t apprehended Monmouthshire first all-female, pyjama clad housebreaking team and we only narrowly escaped being carted off to prison.