Fire, fire!

Today Deafinitely Girly is feeling rotten! My face is full of mucus and my throat feels like I accidentally swallowed a block of knives.

How delightful!

Anyway, I don't know about you, but I always find I am much more accident prone and hear a lot less too, when I am poorly.

Take this morning when I awoke at 5.30am thinking about work – I was dreaming about something I had sorted last week and woke up panicking that I hadn’t done it.

I decided to break the cycle of panic and went to the bathroom. Then, CRASH! I fell down the stairs. To me it sounded like the du-du-dud of the drums after someone cracks a joke. To New Housemate and Very New Neighbours Below, it probably sounded like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had come a cropper!

But that's not what I am here to tell you about. Oh no…

The news today is that yesterday discovered I can hear the fire alarm in my flat... very well in fact. It's quite unlike anything I've ever heard before and when it went off, I nearly had a heart attack. There I was watching Star Wars…

*yawn – sorry Gingerbread Man, I am still not converted!

…and wrapping presents when I was suddenly aware of a din so loud that even the dead could have heard it. Heck, even the deaf dead could have heard it!

Having not heard any sort of fire alarm for a good long while, I did what you should do in these situations... I panicked.

I grabbed my handbag, favourite coat, and London Aunt's Christmas present, as I think she's going to love it and didn't want it to perish if there really were flames licking at my door, and then, I legged it and found Very New Neighbour 2 in the lobby frantically stabbing at the buttons of our fire alarm control panel, frilly apron around her waist, wooden spoon in hand, looking quite mortified.

But the main thing was the building wasn't burning, even if her dinner was!

But knowing that I can now rescue myself from my building in the event of a fire is not the best thing that happened yesterday. No, that would be that even though I was feeling really poorly and needed my bed and some tlc, the adrenalin from the fire alarm episode kept me going until 9pm, which was crucial as Top Gear was on late… and it was great.