With Christmas hard on our heels we can start to look forward to cosy nights in by a roaring fire, or if your house is anything like mine, balled up in a blanket leaning heavily against a radiator. We tend to forget what winter was like the last time around and look back on it with rose tinted spectacles, forgetting all the accidents we had slipping on the ice or while we were standing on a stool trying to attach mistletoe to the ceiling.
Christmas is a particularly bad time for accidents but death lurks in every shadow. For example, 67,000 people receive injuries every year opening their lunch, be that their sandwiches, canned drinks or get the wrapper off a ready meal. 150 people stab themselves every day trying to lever lids or get into food packaging with a knife.
My brother in law is afraid of buttons, little does he know what damage the tea cosy is capable of! As many as 37 people a year are hurt badly enough to require hospital treatment. Most were scalds where people had tried to pick up their pots by the cloth rather than the handle, the rest from slipping on them as they lay in wait on slippy kitchen floors.
You might want to start filling out a claim form for injuries compensation against your tailor as 5310 people were hurt in 2002 putting their trousers on. Socks and tights took out another 11,700. Most of the damage was caused by hurried dressing the rest were lost to tripping in messy bedrooms.
Shoes are equally evil, 379,000 injuries can be directly attributed to these hurt engines. But you can’t trust anything. Hairbrushes account for 1394 hospital visits. Vegetables might ostensibly be good for your health but try telling that to the 14,150 people they hurt in a year.
And don’t think that sitting in one place and not moving about too much is going to help. My brother is among the 43,173 who have been taken to accident and emergency after battling sofas. The rest of the lounge room set is just as hostile, armchairs tuck up 15,355 unwary householders while the pouffe does for a further 16,399. One can only imagine the horror if they ever started to consolidate their mutual hatred of the human race. They should be our domestic overlords!
Of course some people ask for everything they get. Take the student who clogged up his dough maker so tried to pull the mixture out without disconnecting the machine from the mains. Once the arm was free it broke his in four places. Once the bones were more or less knit a concerned friend (or should that be fiend?) asked how he could possibly have done it. He was good enough to demonstrate. Breaking his arm once again.
