A series of rants - No.1

Rant #01

Crime Wave Announcement. It has come to my attention that a new breed of Underworld Super-Criminal is lurking in every home in the United Kingdom. The perpetrators of these heinous crimes are really quite ordinary, blending into the background so well it is almost impossible to tell they are murderers.

Before the inevitable panic sets in, and Crimestoppers receive an unprecedented amount of telephone calls, let me throw more light on these dark, criminal individuals. I now name the perpetrators of nearly 1000 deaths in the United Kingdom every year: alarm clocks, bedside lamps, baths, socks, beds, and stairs.

Surely these innocent inanimate objects cannot be the cause of so much pain and misery? They are.

Alarm clocks and bedside lamps kill fifteen people every year. One can only assume they saw the light and it was their time to go. A third as many again are killed falling out of bed! Do these people have mattresses ten feet high,placed on a concrete floor? Baths claim the lives of thirty people a year, proving cleanliness is next to godliness. If you think these facts are unbelievable try this one for size: socks have caused the death of sixty people per year. The only conclusions I can draw from this is the stress of trying, often fruitlessly, to locate the matching sock is an unknown cause of sudden heart failure; or is it because partners, fed up with snoring, are stuffing smelly socks down their loved ones' throat, just to get a good night's kip? The mind boggles.

The final killer is perhaps the most obvious: stairs. These claim the lives of nearly two people a day, or just over 600 per year! The queues at the Post Office every Thursday seem to condemn this as a falsehood, but with the younger generation accounting for only 20% of the UK population perhaps we should make steps steeper?

What this information shows is not how dangerous our world is - it is actually the safest it has ever been - but that everything we do, 24 hours a day, is a calculated risk. I first chanced upon this word when I spotted it, printed boldly, on a board game of that name. The only risk with the game was one of falling asleep. Really, it should be renamed a 'bored game'.

These risks named above are probably relatively small compared to say, drinking, smoking, and eating beef on the bone. True? Almost.

Alcohol kills thirty eight times more people than alarm clocks, socks, beds, lamps, baths, and stairs put together; tobacco about fifty times. Beef on the bone, perhaps considered to be one of the most dangerous substances known to mankind (?), kills about six. Not six times, six people.

With these facts to hand, I propose the following: stay in bed, in the dark with your alarm clock buzzing, eating beef on the bone. Don't wash and remain naked. Remember, under no circumstances go downstairs. If you find you have nothing to do, play RISK. At least it will remind you how exciting your life really is.