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.

I kind of liked the groaning. It was company. But I still had the wailing of the wind through the cracks in the front door, huge ceiling to floor gaps where the brickwork of the porch isn’t tied on to the house.

‘Heathcliff! I’ve come home now! So cold…’ says the front door most days and especially when the Beast from the East blows across the common.

The keeper tried to stop that too, with injector foam, but I was pleased when it didn’t work.

As for the upstairs window, I was enjoying having Cathy banging on that until I realised all my money was flying through it in the form of lost heating. I taped a clear plastic dress bag over it with gaffer.

It filled with air like a balloon and has been straining at the quadruple thick tape ever since.