Something's been waking me in the night. Waking me with an adrenaline fright and I lie for a fewseconds, alert and afraid and listening very very hard for the cause.
Calls of nature are not the problem, before you start on that line of thought.
Calls from nature are not the problem - living here one gets used to night noises of the natural world. There are owls and foxes and badgers in the vicinity and occasionally even the wild ponies patter along the lane in the early hours of the morning. All these noises I know and understand and they hold no fears for me.
I don't mind the creaking of the ancient timbers - they've held up for 400 years or more, why would they give up on me now? They just squeak and groan away to one another in their timeless communication with other timbers in other parts of the cottage. Nothing to be afraid of there.
The HKCs get out and about at night and are regularly picked on by the ubiquitous Black Tom without which no village is complete. There are screams and yowls and growls and shrieks periodically and it sounds fearful but I have no fear, just irritation at being woken. (I keep a selection of old potatoes which I chuck out of the windows in the general direction of the territorial disputes. I can sort out anything within fifty feet with my unerring potato-aim - and it's not because I can see the combatants. If I were aiming by sight the fights would go on until
morning.)
No no, something else keeps waking me up with a jerk every few nights. It's a high-pitched monosyllabic squeak and although it is getting quieter, it still sounds off four or five times at intervals of several minutes before I fling off the eiderdown and stomp around the place looking for - what?
What am I looking for? Not a mouse, not an alarm clock ...
It took me a few nights to work it out and now, even though I know exactly what it is, I don't know where to find it so that I can take a hammer to it (never mind the potatoes now, this is out of their league) so that it will either leave me in peace or save my life properly and at the appropriate time: somewhere in this house there is a smoke detector that has never been fixed up but which has live batteries. As the batteries fail, the alarm gives out these piercing warning squeaks to remind me that it needs setting up properly and with new power units. I hear a squeak, leap out of bed and wait for the next so that I can locate the thing - and then, of course, there is silence. I go back to bed and the sodding thing beeps again. It doesn't seem to squeak in daylight.
I think it must be in a suitcase or under a pile of 'filing' or something but without taking the place apart I will never find it. I can't just wait for the batteries to wear out, I'll be demented by then (NO COMMENT)
I'm not afraid of wildlife, not even spiders in the bath, but I get a horrible fearful awakening every time one of these alarms decides to protest its low energy, I jerk awake wondering what has woken me ...
I'm going to do some housework this afternoon and find what I'm looking for. I will either feed it a new battery and put it somewhere it could detect smoke if there were any, or I'm going to take the fifteen-pound swing hammer from Up The Field and I'm going to smithereen the bloody thing.
New verb: To Smithereen. I'll add that to my private lexicon.
At least something useful might come out of my rude awakenings.
I feel for you, I really do.
ReplyDeleteMy smoke detectors work from the mains and two years ago - just over, actually - they began bleeping. The only way to stop the bleep is to turn their circuit off at the mains. That also stops the front door bell working too.
Even with the circuit off the alarms still work. I only have to look at the toaster and they explode.
Every few months they emit a different bleep and I have to turn the power back on for a few hours (putting up with bleep one) and then turn it all off again.
The bleep sounds like a demented budgie with a stutter. I have three alarms, one outside my bedroom.
Waving a packet of Paxo at it doesn't help.
We had a problem with a bleeping noise in the night and couldn't find it for ages, it turned out to be an alarm on an old watch in a suitcase under the bed. These noises drive you nuts.
ReplyDeleteOh I remember us having that exact same problem - hunting for the strange noise that turned out to be the dying smoke alarm. You've just reminded me actually, we never did get round to replacing the battery.
ReplyDelete'To smithereen' something is an excellent
description!
Dear Baggy, why would waving a packet of Paxo help ANYTHING?
ReplyDeleteShirley, I wonder if my late Beau-Pere's watch could be the problem ...
Karen, thank you for liking my new word!
Our alarms are wired to the mains as well and have a habit of going off at odd times for no apparent reason. Whoever installed them must have been a giant because the upstairs one is about a hundred feet up and unreachable even by ladder - and anyway I don't have a head for heights.
ReplyDeleteAlso it sits on its side so everytime a spider or a bit of dust falls in, it beeps.
One day I suppose we'll get something done about it.
Hadn't thought od switching it off at the circuit board. Must try it.
My neighbours don't need reminding of the wretched smoke alarm battery problem...about ten years ago we went away for the weekend and the smoke alarm started doing the low battery beeping after we'd gone.
ReplyDeleteNo one had a spare key, so they had to put up with it until we got back on the Sunday evening...
Perhaps we need a remote control off switch for occasions like this.