I, too, was robbed while asleep

I never thought I could feel sorry for Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, especially not on a glamorous assignment to Cannes, but I do now. Like me, they know how it feels to have your most private space invaded by an intruder. Your body may be unscathed but your mind takes much longer to recover. The girls were victims of a classic Côte d'Azur robbery. They happen on night sleepers down to the Mediterranean, they happen in hotels and also, it seems, in villas. Somebody sneaks in and chloroforms you, or sprays knock-out gas under your door, and while you are comatose and unresisting, your worldly goods are stripped. You wake up poorer, sadder and unable to remember a single thing.

But nobody got hurt and, as Trinny Woodall said briskly and with plenty of British sang-froid: "It was a really unpleasant incident and we just want to put it behind us." It's the same spirit that has you scoffing as you chuck away the Victim Support letter offering comfort when your house has been burgled. Get over it, you tell yourself as you smartly change the locks and kiss your vanished possessions goodbye. But getting over it isn't so easy, as I found when I woke to the ultimate nightmare: a burglar in my bedroom. It was four in the morning. My husband was away. The children were tiny and tucked up in their beds, but they were still at the stage of sleepwalking into my room in the middle of the night, so a few nocturnal noises were par for the course. Something woke me up - small, scratchy noises, somewhere beyond the rim of my consciousness. I surfaced slightly and waited for a small, warm body to climb into bed beside me - and waited.

No pad of little feet, no warm body, but still, I realised, those soft, indefinable rustlings. I opened my eyes and realised that the room was illuminated by a strange, dim light. It went off, then on again, like a torch. The bedroom I had at the time was L-shaped, with the bed in a recess, so I couldn't see what was happening around the corner. I was profoundly puzzled but not scared. Whatever was happening was too unprecedented and undefined to have formed into a threat. In fact it was so dreamlike that I closed my eyes again, but it didn't go away. So, without the idea of a burglar having even formed clearly in my mind, I thought I'd better see what was going on. I still thought "child" rather than "intruder".

Very quietly, I crept out of bed and around the corner of the recess and came face-to-face with a figure, right there in the sanctuary of my bedroom, rifling his way through my shelves. I still didn't have time to be frightened because the burglar was terrified first. Whether he thought I was fast asleep, or whether he simply hadn't realised that there was somebody in bed around the corner, I don't know, but he let out a yell of horror, like a man who has seen a ghost, and legged it - thank God - through the bedroom door. He ran down the stairs as fast as he could, while I, electrified by a massive surge of adrenaline, screamed abuse at him down the stairwell, even as my hands were grabbing the phone and dialling 999.

It was a very surreal night. The children slept through everything. I rushed into the nanny's bedroom, too scared to go downstairs by myself, and we huddled there, watching for the police out of the bedroom window. They came en masse and very fast, complete with big dogs on leashes, who sniffed the burglar's route through an unlocked patio door, around the garden and over a high fence into the school grounds next door. It was while I was leaning against the wall, watching men and dogs pour through my quiet suburban house, that the adrenaline began to subside. Suddenly, I felt shocked and faint and my legs began to shake.

Like all survivors, once the first shock was over I realised how lucky I'd been. He hadn't attacked me or my children. He'd left none of the destructive chaos that makes people want to move out then and there. He'd been very professional. I never saw his face, just a dark figure who could have been wearing a balaclava - useless for identification, perfect for nightmares. He'd been through the ground floor of the house, tipping the contents of my handbag into a flower bed and taking the cash, swiftly going through desk drawers. My family and I seemed to have survived unscathed, at the loss of a few quid. It took some days to discover the greatest loss of all.

The next night, alone because my husband was still away, I hallucinated that somebody was hiding in the bedroom cupboards. I heard a noise and, heart thudding, I flung myself at the cupboard doors to trap the intruder. Very slowly, as the adrenaline subsided, I realised that there was nobody there. Even after my husband came home, I sat upright at the slightest sound and lay, sleepless, listening to every creak. A sudden noise would set my heart pounding again with an adrenaline surge that prevented further sleep.

For more than a year I woke at the slightest sound and, although I'm over it now and have been for a long time, I still love the sense of extra security of sleeping in hotels and other people's houses. I hope it doesn't take Trinny and Susannah as long as that, but even once they enjoy a secure night's sleep, they'll still have gained the knowledge that the most precious thing burglars steal isn't jewellery. It's peace of mind.