SO staff at a chain of budget hotels are being given advice on how to deal with naked guests found wandering round the corridors at night.

And we're not talking about stag-night pranksters having had a skinful.

The thought of somnambulists without a stitch may arouse the mirth of nine out of ten of you but for those of us who have trod the floorboards at night while thinking we were safely tucked up in the land of nod, it is about as funny as a pair of pyjama bottoms without a cord.

I, apparently, was a child sleepwalker.

My mother only told me this when she thought I was grown up enough to handle it - when I was 45 - but it seems that, as a boy, I regularly prowled the house in my sleep at night.

For the sake of the reputation of the Perkins family, it must be stressed that, like all well brought up boys in that era, I slept in a pyjama suit and was as well-covered as any Calvinist would require in the cause of moral decency.

But soon after my copy of Just William, Jennings, Hotspur or the Complete Works of Chaucer (editor: "in your dreams, Perkins") hit the floor, I would rise like a ghost and amble round our landing, which in winter housed a hot paraffin heater.

My worried mother and father would lie in bed trying to hear when I'd risen in order to intercept or follow me and, finally steer me back to bed.

Sometimes, like a secret R. White's Lemonade drinker, I would glide past their room before they heard me and only alert them as a stair creaked on my way to the kitchen.

Then it was up the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire and my head would be on the pillow again before you could say "greedy nuisance".

I would remember nothing of my adventure the next morning.

Thinking back to those days, I wonder how I was ever allowed to go on cub camp at the age of eight or nine and just thank the stars that nothing untoward happened.

(I did wonder, mind you, why Shufflebottom and Grunter used to snort behind their caps next morning while reciting Wee Willie Winkie.) Oblivious as I was to my nightly excitement, I think I know when my dozy perambulations ended.

I had a bad shock. As did my flatmates of the time.

I was 22 and sharing a flat with a woman nicknamed the Dragon and her partner. They shared a room while I, sad to say, slept alone.

One Saturday night, it seems, while they were out late clubbing, I had got up in my sleep and walked.

They found me curled up in the bath and, kindly, led me, still slumbering, back to my bed where I slept the sleep of the innocent until the morning.

In those days I'm afraid, I didn't own pyjamas, night-boxers, or even a nightshirt and slept as nature, I thought, intended.

When I greeted them in the kitchen the next morning they told me, in over-elaborate detail, what had happened.

Even the Dragon was smiling as she ate her sausage and two eggs.