My loathing of alarms will never be abated. Alarm clocks, smoke alarms, the fire alarm at work, the oven timer. However, it is the domestic burglar alarm that I hate with a passion, which, if harnessed, would be enough to provide power to my sleepy locale until the end of days. Unfortunately, Electricity Northwest seem to be having a bit of difficulty providing power to this little corner of Bolton, as evidenced by a series of power cuts – or “outages” as they call them these days – over the past day or so.

Of course, life being what it is, the disruption to our electricity supply has coincided with that point in the night when I have been in the deepest of slumbers. How do I know this? Well, because when there’s a power cut, a couple of things happen:

1. Every fucker’s house alarm starts going off at the same time, which has the consequence of waking every poor bastard just as they’re having the most delightful dream about being Nigella Lawson’s kitchen slave, at the second before she starts to mouth the word “unctuous” (with camera close-up).

2. The printer in the back bedroom/study/dressing room restarts with a clatter and whizz and a whir of sliding and rotating components.

Soon enough, the majority of alarms are silenced and the people of this parish can return to their slumber. Unfortunately for some though, the Nigella of their dreams has run off with yet another loser and their love remains unrequited.

The morning after the most recent disturbance, after a couple of rounds with my alarm clock’s snooze button, I stumbled my way down the stairs and into the dining room. My own house alarm went off: sirens, strobe lights, beeping things. It took a couple of seconds to register. How could this be my house alarm? I’ve never activated the thing once and I’m not even sure what the code is. How on earth could this be happening? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING TO ME??

I tried to turn off the fuses and it just beeped more. I hit the numbers of the keypad in the living room – no response. I tried the keypad in the kitchen – no response. I was in a living hell at 6.30am, the little dog was going into meltdown.

How on earth was I going to deal with this situation? Well, the first thing to do was, quite obviously, put the kettle on and make coffee. The next thing to do was to find the main box for the alarm and rip the fucking thing off the wall. Before resorting to that though, I figured that an examination of the internal workings of the thing might help identify a less destructive method of dealing with the noisy problem from my absolute worst nightmares.

Screwdriver in hand, I opened the box, hopeful of finding an off switch. Of course there wasn’t a bloody off switch, it was more like a terrorist bomb from an action film. “Red or blue?” Red or blue? There were about fifty wires in there of all sorts of colours, randomly chopping at them with a pair of nail clippers was never going to be useful solution. And then I saw them: fuses. I couldn’t see a thing in any detail, but I started pulling the fuses in sequence until eventually, I removed the one that silenced screaming.

Once the sense of relief had left me, confusion reigned again. What on earth had happened? How can an alarm system suddenly arm itself? So not only does my fear of burglar alarms stem from the terror of not being able to disarm a system in time before the bells and sirens start, all the time being beeped at loudly, but now I find, the bloody things can arm themselves out of spite while disabling the control keypads. This is a whole new circle of hell that I’d never imagined in my worst nightmares. It’s almost enough to make me want to live in a yurt, far away from the entrapment of reliance on mains electricity and precious things that need protecting from theft.

Almost, but not quite.

But thinking about my whole issue with alarms, does this make me an alarmist? Or am I alarmic? Alarmophobic? If somebody holding the view that people of other ethnic backgrounds are inferior to people of their own is a racist, what does that make a strategist… or a therapist… or organist? Is organism something we should be marching in the streets against?

This whole matter has confused me immensely and I am consulting with my electrician to find an explanation. He’ll probably just tell me that I was inputting the wrong code and that’ll be fifty quid thankyouverymuch.

Daytime drinking
I did daytime drinking today, but finished by about 5.30. My body now finds itself in that weird 4am place where it’s not sober, but no longer drunk. Aldehydes are doing unspeakable things inside me and I really ought to go to sleep. I wonder what Nigella is up to.