It all began at the beginning of last week when we noticed that the brand new surround sound system we have, which we use instead of the TV speakers was turning itself up on its own.

This was not the only thing either as later, it began switching itself out of mute and then turning the volume up to maximum. The first time this happened I'd muted the sounds before racing up to spend a penny, nearly caused me to miss the porcelain altogether as it came on at maximum volume (550 watts) with a vengeance and sent the cat under the bed, leaving nothing but a vapour trail and scorched carpet behind him.

It was driving us mad and after sending an email to LG to explain what was happening and ask for help, I figured it would all be fixed soon.

That wasn't to be, but it seemed to cure itself, which was just as well as LG never replied.

However, that wasn't the end of it.

At the same time as the above cured itself, we started getting the most annoying beeeeeep... booooooop... noise that was happening about every three minutes... all day and all night.

I initially thought that it was the LG home cinema box; a kind of natural progression from controlling itself, it had obviously got bored with just tweaking the volume as all we did was turn it down again, so it had decided on more directly annoying methods.

I unplugged it and left it, but the noise kept on going. It wasn't that then.

I unplugged the TV. No change; not that either.

I unplugged the video. No change. Nope, it wasn't that.

Finally, I unplugged the Sky box. The sound stopped.

"Aha!" I thought and phoned Sky.

In due course, an engineer came round and listened as the noise came regularly, every three minutes. He scratched his head a lot after swapping out the old box for a brand new one out of the cellophane, which didn't cure the problem.

"Dunno mate," he said and arranged to have one of the more technical bods come round and have a butchers.

Now the curious thing is that when we unplugged the Sky box, the noise stopped and he even said so. So upon coupling up the new box and finding that the noise restarted immediately, he was completely lost.

Well, I haven't heard a dickie bird from Sky since they replaced our box, but last night and quite by accident, Pen discovered something weird.

Our cat flap is battery operated and is a security device to keep out all unwanted cats. Sam has a special electronic gizmo on his collar that tells the cat flap to unlock when he's near to it and it appears it was running low on power.

I changed the batteries.

No more noise.

Okay; I know; I'm thick, but it did seem to have me, the Sky engineer and everyone else baffled.

The coincidences were stacking up though and it's easy to see how I could have been fooled as it seemed to occur and not occur right at key moments and it was impossible to get a bearing on where the noise was coming from when it was about.

Thanks to Pen, we got a brand new Sky box and I doubt very much whether they'll come back and reclaim it.

Lesson learnt...

Until the next time that is :)