SMOKE ALARM

I’ve hurt my foot while disabling the smoke alarm. I guess I’ve proven at least, that it works, and that I’m not going to perish in a towering inferno.

Every cloud.

This comes from running a bath and making toast at the same time. You would have thought I could notch up two things on the multi-tasking inventory! Nope, can’t even make it to Basic Level One Multi-Tasking Training, the simple art of combining one low maintenance activity with another. My brain simply forgot what it was doing.

For the briefest of moments I imagined that the the hot bath had set the alarm off - so I turned the taps off.

The alarm continued to howl like a robot banshee. It’s so loud it could be used to indicate when a jumbo jet is reversing. It’s a wonder the dogs from the park in the next village haven’t come barking up my front door. Presumably closer neighbours just rolled their eyes at each other.

Within half a second of course, I realised that the grill in the kitchen was billowing with smoke. I pulled it out and the handle fell off, clattering metallic to the floor. What looked like the ancient remains of two fossilised leaves, temple sacrifices of a bygone age, chuffed fresh smoke into the air, extinguishing every memory that they had once been fresh slices of Warburtons Wholemeal, Medium Sliced. I left them there. The alarm was still wailing.

Gazelle-like I sprang. I grabbed a dining chair and planted it directly underneath the smoke alarm, leaping stocking-footed onto the seat. It wobbled. It was at that point of course that I stubbed the chair and bashed my foot. No time to really notice though. I was busily thumping the smoke alarm, encouraging it to shut up.

I’ve always found encouragement to be a wonderful tool, useful in many a pastoral situation. A gentle word, after all, turneth away wrath. Well in this instance the gentle encouragement of the palm of my hand was more effective in the end. The alarm stopped.

The toast was of course, crispy. I scraped it and ladelled it with lovely butter and marmalade, and then crunched into it with my teeth.

My foot throbbed.

Nothing that a nice hot bath won’t sort out! I cheerily said to myself. Perhaps I could also use the time to calculate how to multi-task better, how to flick imperceptibly from thought to thought like some of my cleverer friends do. Perhaps I could use it to consider life’s great challenges of organisation, of communication, of relating well to people, and of getting things done, efficiently, quickly, brilliantly.

Perhaps. And perhaps it would all have been a lot more possible, had I not accidentally run a bathful of cold water.