Safe

Firstly, we haven't done any new words for a while, so -

Volunteer - to offer to cry

Helpful - I've got all the help I need, thank you

Now to today's topic, and listen up, it's important.

Several years and four houses ago there was something on television about the danger of carbon monoxide emissions. They can come through faulty gas appliances and they don't smell of anything. They make you headachey and nauseous, and are fatal if you don't take action. I'm a scaredy-cat, so as soon as I heard about it I bought a carbon monoxide detector. It didn't cost much, you put batteries in and it beeps if there's carbon monoxide about. If it wants new batteries it does a different beep.

On Friday at about five o'clock, I was in the dining room writing and Tony had just gone into the sitting room to put the fire on. In ten minutes, the carbon monoxide detector was beeping away furiously.

I'd had the thing for years and now realised that I didn't know what to do if it sounded. I rang the gas fitter who had put the fire in, got his voicemail, and looked for somebody else to phone. Typical, I thought. Friday afternoon after five, when can we get anybody to come out? And LYS and The Lassie, who are getting married soon, were coming for the weekend. It would be bad enough gassing ourselves without gassing the kids as well. I supposed we'd just have to leave the fire off and wait till Monday - then the gas fitter arrived on the doorstep. t was about ten minutes since I'd phoned him.

He checked the fire and found it was belting out carbon monoxide because there was a blockage in the chimney. He immediately called the guy who put the fire in, and he also came straight out. There and then they put down dustsheets, got out the brushes and swept a jackdaw's nest out of the chimney. (A jackdaw, too, and didn't she look cross.) When I say 'jackdaw's nest' I reckon it was a multi-storey one. This jackdaw had spotted an opportunity and was renting out flats to other jackdaws. We half-filled the wheelie bin with the debris.

Everything was made safe within two hours of my call. By lunchtime next day they'd put covers on the chimney pots, put the fire together, reconnected the gas and tested the fire again, just to be sure. And for this work, carried out at the weekend in an emergency when they could have charged what they liked? I had made a guess at what was reasonable. They charged about a quarter of it.

So - we are safe. We have the best guys in the world at the end of a telephone.

Now get out of the House of Stories and order a carbon monoxide detector.