Chris Maclean: Breakfast blaze scare

This morning there was a fire here. Nothing on the scale of the tragedies witnessed recently on television, but enough to scare me.

It was an innocent enough scenario. My daughter put bread into the toaster then went for a shower. The toast jammed, the toast burned and the smoke alarm was activated. With alarm bells ringing throughout the building and three bemused lads sitting having breakfast downstairs I rose from my bed and rushed to the kitchen. The toaster was smoking heavily and flames leapt from the toast in the slots. My wife silenced the alarm and I put the toaster by the window, opened some windows to clear the smoke, shut the kitchen door and went back to bed. The alarm continued to ring intermittently.

Five minutes later my daughter shouted to me. The fire had restarted.

I rushed into the kitchen to discover the plastic toaster casing was alight and flames were leaping from it. There was no time to dally. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and put the thing out properly.

Fire is one of those issues that happens to other people. Those hotel tragedies are always somewhere else. But right here and right now it feels like we were close to being one of those news stories.

It is only two weeks since I was being rude to the fire officers and complaining to my sister-in-law how expensive the alarm and extinguisher maintenance was.

Now I've got burnt worktops, a smell of burnt plastic around the flat and no means to make toast.

The only upside I can see is that I can get my staff to play with the remains of the fire extinguisher contents to understand how they work. But I'll be mindful of that alarm bell and how it came between us and disaster.