Half past 4 in the dead of night.
Piercing house-echoing single high-pitched beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Every 20 seconds (I counted the intervals while hiding my head under my pillow).
Yes, one of our smoke alarms has realised with sudden great urgency that its battery is running low. As you all know, smoke alarms only ever realise this in the dead of night.
Finally, I gave up on sleep and staggered downstairs to check if we had any 5V batteries in the kitchen drawer of doom - you can tell I'm a veteran of the smoke alarm battery wars, because we did have some.
Unfortunately, the ladder is in the shed, and also there's no way I'm climbing up a ladder in my groggy furious state, and also in my experience when changing the battery on these things you always end up accidentally triggering the full-blown screeching alarm (which I guessed would not impress the rest of the household). Which meant I needed to wait until proper morning.
So I got on with some morning chores instead e.g. emptying the dishwasher, making the packed lunches, all the while being serenaded every 20 seconds with the piercing BEEP. And obviously by this time I was very very awake, no change of going back to sleep. Brewed up some tea, sat down to browse MN until "normal" wake up time.
And you know what? Some time in the past half hour, the %£$%# sodding thing has fallen silent.
Obviously I'm still going to change its sodding battery this morning, but 