"THEY'RE here!" It was said in a playful, almost sing-songy voice, but the underlying menace was clearly detectable all the same.

For anyone who has seen the film Poltergeist, the vision of your youngest child pointing at a snowy TV screen and uttering those famous creepy words is disturbing, and not just because she is sitting too close and the static build-up has made her hair stand out like a blonde dandelion clock.

The hair on the back of my neck immediately followed suit (I really should look into electrolysis before I start being mistaken for a yeti).

"Who's here, sweetheart?" I said, while surreptitiously looking around me for hysterical clowns and gooey ectoplasm.

"The Fimbles," she replied. "They're here, but they've gone. Here. Gone. Here. Gone."

If only it had been a child-stealing poltergeist. I would have known how to handle that (and it would have saved me a whole morning of the all-new and totally fabulous 'here-gone' game).

Everyone knows that if you have a mysterious ghoulie or ghostie in your gaff, all you have to do is get yourself a short old woman with a helium voice, a bucket of tennis balls and a very long piece of string. It's not hi-tech but it does the trick, at least until it's time for the sequel.

What no one knows and what no one can tell me - and believe me, I've asked - is what to do if your house is out to get you. Our home may be a spirit-free zone, apart from the booze in the utility room and the secret stash of liqueur chocolates in the airing cupboard, but it not entirely fright free.

The intermittently snowy telly is just the tip of the iceberg. Nothing electrical works in this house for more than about a week.

We are now on to our second digital box doohickey (who said women don't know their amp from their elbow when it comes to technology?) because the first became inexplicably stuck on Cbeebies which, for those of you who haven't seen it, is like Dante's Inferno with smiley bunnies.

The video and DVD players regularly sulk and refuse to play ball, never mind any actual videos and DVDs. The downstairs phone works fine, but the upstairs one appears to have decided it wants to be an alarm clock instead, denying us phone calls but making up for it by bleeping randomly in the early hours of the morning.

Our radios cut out every 15 minutes, leaving only grating white noise instead of the latest gripping instalment of the Archers ("I wuz goin' to bake sum cakes for the witch-burnin' at The Bull, but I've run out of flour..." No! You can't cut out there - what happens next? Will Phil and Jill save the day or will it lead to the end of Borcesterlingshireton civilisation as we know it?).

And our waterworks aren't much better. In the past year alone we've had two leaking loos, several dripping taps, a shower that makes it look like it's raining in the hallway, a broken pipe that flooded the path at the side of the house, a dodgy overflow and a shower that sprang a leak the size and force of Niagara the day after it was fitted.

Is it just me, or is this place trying to tell us something? Okay, so it's not exactly Amityville Horror, but this is definitely a weird, unpredictable house. We might not have evil spirits lurking under the stairs seeking bloody vengeance, but I'm pretty sure there is the ghost of a dead DIY-er somewhere under the floorboards.

Do you think Handy Andy does exorcisms?

Updated: 08:51 Monday, January 03, 2005