I woke in my chair just after midnight on Monday morning, feeling stiff and misshapen I’d missed the chance to post on the day I was describing so I forced myself to stay up long enough to add photos, but couldn’t be bothered with captions. Then I posted and realised, too late, that  then I I’d forgotten the title.

Fortunately Albert Schweitzer was there to supply the deficiency.

Things got worse when I started to get ready for work. My first clumsiness was to knock the sliced beef off the kitchen counter, where it landed with a slap on the floor. It probably picked up millions of bacteria despite my application of the Ten Second Rule. This, as most of you will know, states that food is still fit to eat if you pick it up less than ten seconds after it hit the floor.

I’ve also seen it described as the Five Second Rule. No way that’s going to happen. It takes me longer than that to bend these days.

Thinking sensibly, for once, I decided the risk wasn’t worth it and, regretfully, binned the meat.

Then I remembered what a doctor had once told me when I was discussing unpasteurised apple juice. According to an American website I’d read you have to pasteurise juice before drinking. We’d been happily pressing for years and feeding to all and sundry from 5 to 95 years old. He said that if you drink it immediately after juicing, the microorganisms haven’t time to multiply and cause problems, and told us there was no reason to stop doing it. So I thought. And I decided that if I ate the beef immediately I should be OK. Fortunately I’d just put a new bag in the bin so that was clean.

Anyway, with the addition of horseradish sauce I enjoyed beef sandwiches for breakfast and suffered no ill effects.

The second thing he told me was that I could safely disregard most food hygiene advice from Americans as they worry too much.

Of course, this was the same man who cut his finger tip quite badly with a power saw and tied it all back with a bandage which became quite grubby over the next few weeks. When I mentioned the possibility of gangrene he just muttered that it would either heal or drop off. And, remarkably, it did heal.

I also dropped the phone, knocked it out of Mark’s hand (twice) as we both tried to pick it up, rendered the scanner inoperative, dropped stamps all over the floor and generally had an uncoordinated sort of day.

All that was as nothing compared to the day suffered by the mother of the owner of the Chinese Takeaway between the old shop and the new shop. She was burning cardboard boxes in the back garden when the fire spread to a pile of dry conifer trimmings. It then spread to one of the dead conifers.

When the opticians on the other side noticed flames higher than their roof they decided to call the Fire Brigade.

That’s why today’s photographs show a fire engine, ash on top of my car, and some grumpy firemen. It seems they had better things to do.

Charred conifer on car roof

Firemen – Wollaton Road, Nottingham

Firemen – Wollaton Road, Nottingham