There’s nothing I enjoy more than a scary film. I confess I do  love a good fright; guilty as charged. The Hound of the Baskervilles,  Frankenstein, Murder She Wrote… you name it, I’ll cower behind my Parker Knoll and ‘watch’ it.

Well, yesterday, Kirsty, Flo’s daughter by her third marriage, knowing my penchant for spine-tinglers, brought around a DVD called ‘Drag Me To Hell’. It was rated ’15’, a fact which I found reassuring, it being a number that was comfortably divisible, many times over, into my own age.

So, I settled down in front of the telly with a mug of hot chocolate, a finger bowl of Bombay mix nuts and my favourite blanket over my legs. The clocks had just gone back and the early evening gloom added nicely to the atmosphere.

The music began and I was transported away into the Director’s world and, fifteen minutes later I practically soiled my underwear.

I don’t know what Kirsty was thinking of, giving this video nasty to a frail senior citizen. It was if a defibrillator and a stomach pump had been hooked up to my body as, for one and a half hours, seizure followed spasm followed convulsion.

Watching for the most part through the picket fence of my fingers, I must have shed half a stone in weight with the distress of it, not to mention the screaming! My own neighbours’ absence of curiosity at my anguished shrieks is an additional source of disappointment to me.