Last updated 19:21, Thursday, 21 February 2008

There are times when we must all be tempted to wonder whether we might have turned into health and safety issues. Risks, like Brampton’s confiscated weather vane, wet floors and conker fights.

It could happen to anyone at any time. One minute you’re minding your own business, doing whatever it is that makes innocent people harmlessly happy, the next you’re positively hazardous... like a purple Smartie, loose guttering or an ashtray.

In my case, shift from innocuously inert to potentially combustible appears to have been made surreptitiously. Well, nobody told me about it anyway... until:

“Thank goodness you called me!” Her greeting was made in tones of some distress. “You’re no longer recognised. You’re unacceptable!”

An anonymous poison pen letter had suggested as much just the other day but since nothing anonymous can ever be taken seriously it had been dismissed as the scribblings of a lonely man on a bad day. Lonely men have lots of those, apparently.

Now the sinking feeling of heart plunging into heels alerted to something more serious. There may actually be determined conspiratorial forces working against an offcomer with opinions on renaissance, airports, tarn algae, real ale and butchers. Gobby women do tend to ruffle feathers now and again. We can’t help ourselves – it’s in our genes.

But unacceptable? It’s beginning to look like an issue of health and safety, which these days needs show no rhyme nor reason for ambushing the innocuously inert with another threatening thou-shalt-not, plucked from the jobsworth’s manual of stealth control.

What could have happened? Though I did fall over a health and safety board, positioned hazardously to caution against slipping on a wet floor, I’m generally pretty careful. Haven’t eaten a purple Smartie for years, my floors are uncluttered, ashtrays confined to the privacy of home, don’t do conkers, weather vanes, candles, electric blankets, never play on busy roads or swing on gates.

Tripping on the Market Place cobbles can’t count for much. Nothing was broken and I’ve no intention of suing. My fault. High heels... can heels be too high for health and safety?

“It’s your seven.”

There is a seven in my telephone number. Clearly it has quite recently become a no-go zone. It is no longer acceptable. I must assume that, by association, neither am I.

“I dialled your number several times and kept getting a singing beeping thing,” she told me. “Then a digital woman said: ‘I’m sorry, we do not recognise sevens. Please hang up and try later’ Or words to that effect.”

“Don’t recognise sevens? Since when? What did seven ever do to anybody?”

In defence of maligned digitalised women, it must be said my pal’s home telephone has recently developed an unorthodox life of its own. It operates in a parallel telecommunications universe to other people’s phones. It crackles a lot and spits so fiercely when you’re trying to leave a message you can fear death by snake venom.

These quirks, along with its latest inexplicable aversion to the number seven, may or may not have much to do with environmental factors – perhaps high pressure and morning hoare frosts, rain on the fells, flocking starlings or maybe more specifically earth-moving moles driving JCBs under her lawn and rabbits chewing the heads off her crocuses. Bad vibes can come from anywhere. Lunar eclipse, perhaps?

Why her phone’s controlling digital mistress should decide to launch into hostilities with a number is a mystery the paranoid might treat with suspicion of more than a glitch. And paranoia can tend to be an affliction suffered by offcomers in receipt of anonymous mail – and unacceptable sevens.

Our immediate crisis seems now to have passed and on the bright side it did briefly bring hoots of hilarity from the rest of the girls, gathered for one of our women-only dinners, before causing too much severe disruption... the crisis, not the girls.

But we’re still bemused, if not to say mystified. Theories on what might be out there, fiddling with phones, have been circulating for days now. We love conspiracy theories and there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

Like telephone ghosts, health and safety spooks and step-ladders, for instance.

“Step-ladders?” she said.

“Bought some from the hardware shop at the weekend. They came with a free gift from those ever-present, silently lurking health and safety boys – a publication entitled Important Guide to Step-Ladders.”

Said publication gave detailed and gruesomely illustrated descriptions of the very many ways steps can kill, maim, shatter limbs and otherwise land a user in a hospital’s emergency department, fighting for life, should he or she put a foot on them in order to change a light bulb... recklessly and without first consulting an expert on correct footwear. Riveting stuff. Haven’t yet dared use the darned things.

“Seven pages?”

“Very nearly.”

“Spooky.”

“And unacceptable – unless, of course you’re an offcomer health and safety risk with a singing, beeping thing on your line when the hoare frosts come.”