Saturday - January 22, 2011

you could not make this one up .. not since ‘who’s on first’ has anything been this funny.

Dear Readers ..
You can be forgiven if once read, you might have to go back and read again, to be certain your eyes did see what your brain read.

I really thought this was a joke first time through.  I didn’t get it cos my brain couldn’t register this as truth.
And then the light went on.
As the wife continually reminds me ....

“And what country are you in? Are we in England?”

Here, let me share this with you.

The dinner party that went up in smoke

We didn’t need the emergency services – but they arrived anyway, writes Matthew Norman.

There we were, the nine of us, getting stuck into a delicious chicken pie and wittering about this and that when our hostess went to answer a knock on the door. She returned a moment later to announce, very matter of factly: “There’s a fire next door.” Blimey, someone said, do you mean in the flat next door or in the next block along? “What I mean is next door,” she said, smiling. “In the sitting room.” Well, we don’t get out much, the missus and me, and on the rare occasions we do, the evenings have a tiresome habit of drifting by without an inferno. So what with the novelty value and all, we wandered to the neighbouring room to inspect.

A candle had somehow ignited foliage wrapped around the mirror above the mantelpiece, and the resulting mini-fire was swiftly extinguished. The flat’s owners went to check on their eight-week-old son, whom they found sleeping peacefully and in ostentatiously perfect health in a bedroom protected from so much as an acrid wisp of smoke by a heavy wooden door. All being well, we returned to the chicken pie, commiserating with our hosts about the minor damage, but thanking them for going to such trouble to make the evening memorable.

Several mouthfuls later, the doorbell rang again, and the first tranche of gatecrashers arrived in the form of four firefighters, summoned unbidden by a porter. Nothing peculiar there, you will think, albeit that there was no fire to fight.

It was at this point that the leader of the quartet concluded that we had failed this incendiary version of the dinner party test. To the question, “What should you do if a small fire breaks out during supper?”, the correct answer, he clearly felt, was “Rush out into the street weeping, and scan the road for a Sky news crew to whom you can blub about your journey and the need for post-traumatic stress counselling”. That gets you an A*.

Our answer – “Put it out, make sure any children in the vicinity are unaffected, and get straight back to the food and drink” – failed to impress the board. The chief examiner, overtly irritated by the sang-froid, and possibly by our failure to greet the team as heroic saviours, sent us out into the road, where we were promptly joined by an ambulance crew of four, who seemed to agree that all of us, the baby included, were fine.

And that, you might imagine, would have been the end of it. Perhaps it might have been had the fireman not then made a series of sarcastic remarks to our hostess, hinting broadly that, because that she preferred to let the baby sleep in a warm and smokeless room rather than rush him out into the cold night air, that she, like Sue Ellen in Dallas, was a drunk, a slut and an unfit mother. Eventually, with amazing forebearance, she restricted herself to a mild: “I think you’ve made your point.”

To this, Red Adair’s tough, no-nonsense counterstrike was to summon police back-up. It reminded us of stories about queeny cabin crew demanding an emergency landing to punish a passenger for perceived impertinence in requesting an extra bag of salted peanuts.

Four coppers pitched up, raising the total of public servants in the hallway to a round dozen. “It’s still early,” someone muttered, “maybe there’s time for the coastguard to make a show. I’d hate the last of the emergency services to feel out of the loop on this one.”

It’s always lovely to see the police, especially when they’re so busy servicing shadow cabinet spouses. Even so, it’s hard to understand their presence, in the absence of any suspected crime, let alone why two of them followed mother and baby to a hospital (where the little fellow was monitored through the night and found, inevitably, to be absolutely fine).

Harder to penetrate still is why one officer accompanied my friend when she took her son off to change his nappy, placing himself on guard outside the door. “I’m just doing what I’m told, madam,” was his explanation, but however much one relishes the old Nuremberg defence, it doesn’t quite explain why he was given any orders to obey.

As a unforgettable dinner party, this was as good as it gets, while the deployment of three vehicles and 12 people to deal with a tiny ex-fire, at a cost of God knows how many thousands of pounds, will assuage concern about the ravages of coming public service cutbacks. There may be a little more slack in the system than the Police Federation would have us believe.

As a vignette of an insanely risk-averse culture, however, in which alleged public servants take magisterial umbrage at people’s refusal to over-react with the lachrymose hysteria of an X Factor reject, and even attempt to criminalise them for their calm unconcern, it leaves a slightly more toxic taste in the mouth than any fumes from that melted mirror.

NORMAN

Posted by peiper     on 01/22/2011 at 12:35 PM   
Filed Under: • Big Brother • Daily Life • UK •  
• Comments (7) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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