IT was 3am, and I was wandering round the Hextol Towers conservatory in the dark, sans clothes or spectacles, when I was attacked by a deadly spitting cobra.

My predicament arose because the dog had demanded access to the garden after a late night feast of left-over shepherd’s pie and cabbage, I am told.

One of the few advantages of my increasing deafness is that I no longer hear her urgent squeaks myself, but Mrs Hextol has the auricles of a Rodriguez fruit bat, and considerately wakes me up to tend to the dog’s requirements. She then expends for more energy than it would take to let the dog out herself in inveigling me out of bed to open the door for her little darling.

So it was that I stumbled downstairs cursing, to find the dog standing panting at the door, ignoring my half-hearted cuffs and imprecations before shooting out into the gloom.

It was when I was blundering around in my underpants, still only half awake, that I first heard the hiss and then felt a toxic mist of ice-cold ophidian venom strike me on the side of the face.

I gave a horrified shriek, pawing away at the loathsome liquid trickling down my neck, and switched on the light, not caring a jot that my wobbly person would be cruelly exposed to any night time joggers or insomniacs who happened to be peering through gaps in the hedge.

Even without my glasses, I expected to see the vile reptile swaying seductively on the settee, a sardonic smile on its lipless mouth, but the serpent was nowhere to be seen. I started ripping off cushions and looking under tables, before the reality of what I was doing started to sink in.

Even though we had bought a particularly large bunch of bananas the previous day, the likelihood of them concealing a reptilian intruder were startlingly small.

Although I do spot the occasional somnolent adder when walking the dog, venomous snakes from the Dark Continent and beyond are usually in mercifully short supply in the North Tyne.

I took stock, and by peering myopically at the windowsill, was able to spot the super-duper new electronic air freshener Mrs Hextol had deployed earlier that day to emit random blasts of fragrant moisture about the place.

My hammering heart slowed down by a few dozen beats a minute, but I was still left to reflect on the wisdom of both eating cheese and reading a Wilbur Smith novel before going to sleep.

Mrs Hextol is a firm believer in the adage that cheese should not be eaten after 8pm, as it is guaranteed to induce nightmares, sleepwalking and other night terrors.

My argument that cheese has lots of room to move round in my belly and will therefore have little effect cuts little ice with her. That being said, killer snakes do feature heavily in most Wilbur Smith books, so there may have been some connection there.

In truth though, I do not need any pre-bedtime stimulants to have the most vivid dreams imaginable, often accompanied by a little light somnambulation.

Many years ago, I awoke to see a man dressed all in black creeping into the bedroom, and leapt out of bed with a fierce roar, at which he dived under the bed. I swooped in after him, and started ripping off sheets and tipping up the mattress vertically, much to the consternation of the slumbering Mrs Hextol, who was alarmingly pregnant at the time.

“What on earth are you doing?” she wailed, clinging onto the mattress by her fingernails, her eyes widening with alarm when I announced grimly there was a man hiding under the bed.

One of her real terrors in life is the notion that one day, a hand will reach out from under the bed and grab her ankle as she is about to climb between the sheets

Children came in wide-eyed from adjoining bedrooms to survey the scene, before I slowly realised that there was no way anyone could get under our bed without clambering into a drawer full of spare bedding.

There was nowhere for Tom Thumb to hide, let alone the Milk Tray Man, so I was forced to sleepily confess : “Oh … I must have been dreaming.”

“You silly man,” scolded Mrs Hextol, not for the first time in our marriage, and the children were able to return to their beds with the assurance the house was intruder free.