Real life | 28 March 2018

The sound of something hideous woke me in the dead of night, and I shot out of bed.

I looked at my watch, blinking in the gloom of the energy-saving bulb as it grudgingly dribbled out a slither of light. It was 3 a.m. and there was a strangled wheezing sound in my bedroom.

I’m getting used to this house making noises, though it took me a while to come to terms with the groaning.

An old man groans in pain in the dining room. I assumed it was a ghost. I’ve got every other problem going, structural, legal and decorative. So now I’ve got a poltergeist: the tortured soul of some other poor sod who tried to renovate this place and was driven to the point of insanity and beyond.

Then one day the keeper came round with long strips of sponge, stuck them into the window frame in the dining room and the groaning stopped.