LAST week we told you about a 91-year-old woman who’d been informed she may have to move out of her rented flat.

The wheelchair Doris Turner tucks under the staircase in a ground floor lobby is a fire risk, according to housing company GreenSquare Group.

We also spoke to another tenant, Philip Dunn, who’s been told his cats are a fire risk.

As no sane organisation could possibly make such claims without foundation, I can only conclude that GreenSquare knows something we don’t. Or maybe several somethings.

Could it be that wheelchair manufacturers have taken to making the frames from some lightweight but highly volatile metal? Maybe they’ve fallen into the same trap as racing car makers back in the 1950s, who used magnesium for engine blocks and turned circuits across the globe into hellish vistas of fiery carnage.

Perhaps the seat cushions are stuffed with thermite, and a single stray sunbeam through a window would be all it’d take for the whole chair to go up at several thousand degrees Centigrade and melt its way through the floor like the face-hugger blood in Alien.

I daresay the housing company also has secret knowledge about cats. Why else would it class them as a fire risk? We may sneer, but for all we know there could be loads of hidden information about spontaneous feline combustion. One minute they’d be purring on your lap or demanding food by playfully clawing your eyeballs at three in the morning, and the next they’d go up like Molotov cocktails.

Don’t tell me that sounds silly, either, or that nobody could suppress such devastating data. Cat lovers could do it without breaking sweat – they’ve already taken over the internet with a thoroughness Barack Obama, David Cameron and the sinister, bungling goons of MI5 or the CIA could only dream of.

Or maybe there’s an even more terrifying situation. I shudder to put this thought into print. I fear a knock on the door at midnight, a van ride to the airport in a large holdall and the most extraordinary rendition since we had my Auntie Nelly round for karaoke at Christmas and her top plate shot out during Anarchy In The UK.

What if the cats have taken to combusting after climbing aboard highly flammable wheelchairs?

What if all those unsolved arson cases and other mysterious fires up and down the country were caused by flaming cats riding flaming wheelchairs to oblivion, a bit like Nic Cage in Ghost Rider, except with cats and wheelchairs and probably a lot more entertaining?

If I lived in that block of flats, you can be sure I’d demand answers. In fact, I’d demand that the management company conducted an experiment to prove the hidden dangers of cats and wheelchairs. A good idea would be to create a mock-up of a staircase, perhaps at fire brigade HQ, and stow a folded wheelchair under it.

A qualified fire safety expert – wearing one of those silver flame-retardant suits used by people tackling oil fires – could then release a cat in the vicinity and flee to a concrete bunker.

Of course, it might be that the housing management company is suggesting another scenario – that a cat or a stowed wheelchair might somehow impede people’s escape if fire broke out in the building.

If this is the case, I suppose they’ll be able to cite evidence of such wheelchair and cat-related calamities having occurred in the past.

If not, they’d be open to accusations that they’re willing to cause immense heartache to blameless people rather than run a tiny risk of some future stupid legal action involving a no-win-no-fee lawyer.

Such an accusation, I’m certain, would be grossly unfair.

 

Men have got the stomach to stay slim

IT seems 50 per cent more women than men are being admitted to hospital with obesity problems.

This is clearly because women have more obesity problems than men. Yes, that’ll be it.

Any suggestion that it’s because we men simply suck in our guts and carry on eating until we turn into self-deluding, sentient lard is a disgraceful slander.

  • HAVE you noticed a rash of rather strange Ofsted ratings for schools in the borough lately?

It seems we can’t go a week without some previously highly-rated school suddenly being told it has serious deficiencies which need to be addressed urgently.

What’s even more peculiar is that many of these schools still have the same excellent exam scores they had before their ratings suddenly took a screaming left turn.

There are only two possible reasons for this. One is that the schools have somehow fallen victim to a hitherto unknown form of decline in which teaching standards drop catastrophically while academic performance remains rock steady.

The other is that Ofsted, perhaps in an attempt to justify its continued existence in light of all manner of past failings, has made itself a new set of sticks with which to arbitrarily beat schools.

  • A CHILD was shot in the face in a Swindon park the other Saturday.

If the BB pellet had hit her a centimetre or two to the right, she might have been blinded. Instead she was left with a hole in her flesh and a nasty dose of shock.

The 13-year-old thug responsible was caught after returning to the scene with his father to apologise. While that was good of the adult, it’s a pity his offspring was able to roam a park with a gun and almost maim another human being in the first place.

And the little gunman himself? He was apparently given ‘strong words of advice’ by the police and sent on his way.

I’m glad about that, because if he carries on behaving criminally, who knows what horrific outcomes he might have to suffer.

Only this last week, for example, we’ve had smack and crack dealers looking at serving as much as a year in prison.

Meanwhile, a gang who turned over a jeweller’s shop with sledgehammers, traumatising the staff, face truly draconian stretches of up to about three years before early release