She came into my room in the middle of the night and looked at the wall above my head and said, “Have you got my gnomie?” (Her most cherished possession at the time was a china gnome.)Then I had a stepfather who was a sleepwalker. One night my mother found him in the garden peeing by moonlight on a rose bush his mother had given him for his birthday. (Micturition is apparently a favourite pastime of sleepwalkers.) Another time, we were on holiday in Wales at a caravan site – all seven of us in our tight, sweaty sleeping bags – and he woke us by leaping from his bed in the night.”Where are you off to?” my mother asked.”I have to chase a girl around the caravan,” he barked with lugubrious anxiety.A year or two later, we swapped the caravan for a boat. “What is it?” my mother would say as, each night at 2am, he blundered up on deck. “Making a note of what the weather’s doing,” he would snap officiously, fast asleep.As far as I know, all I have ever done in my sleep is laugh, just sit up and cackle helplessly. It does not happen often and is infinitely less embarrassing than self-watering the flowerbeds, but still I am not at all comfortable with the idea I donot like to be so unaware. Who is this person who dissolves into giggles in the night? What exactly is so funny?OK, so all that happened, apparently, was that Lou got a haircut.

But what was the phantom hairdresser doing with the Magimix blade? Where did that come in? Did he have a go with that first? Or maybe it is not missing at all – maybe it is just wedged at the back of some drawer. You only need two unexplained events in the same night and instantly we think they have to be related.We drive back from Simon and Lou’s and, once the babysitter has left, I go to check on the children as I always do. They are sleeping soundly, limbs flung out, bottoms hunched, the room ringing with the adenoidal chorus of their snores.Much later that night, there is a loud, unwieldy cry and I stumble in to find Chloe sitting up, seething “Get these kittens out of my bed,” she orders. “Get them out!” Her eyes stare beyond me, wild and dark, in a state of sleep.”You’re having a dream, sweetheart.” I settle her, smoothing her hair, rubbing her small, fat back. “Close your eyes, go to sleep.”"Listen to me,” she berates in true Chloe fashion “I want them out of here Now!”The digital clock says 3.10am.

“Do it!” she says, visibly, helplessly asleep.”OK, OK.” I make imaginary kitten-disposal motions with my hands “Look, I’m dealing with the kittens. They’re gone.”She gives me a weary look and falls back on the pillow and I creep out, praying she is satisfied, hoping she never decides to mess with Magimix blades.. One recent Thursday night, thieves broke into the European Weather Centre in Reading and stole £50,000-worth of computer memory chips – yet another robbery which, indirectly, can be blamed on software companies. The theft of computer components has become one of the biggest growth sectors in the UK.