At seven o’clock on Friday evening, every mobile phone in England and Wales went off at once. Not a ring. Not a polite buzz. The screech. That ten second government klaxon previously reserved for floods, incoming missiles and, we now discover, the disposable barbecue.
An entire nation shot two feet into the air. At the Royal Albert Hall, one imagines the Proms audience concluding that Russia had hacked every handset in the stalls to give the 1812 Overture an unusually literal opening. In a thousand pub gardens, overlooking lawns the colour and texture of a digestive biscuit, men quietly lowered bags of charcoal back into their boots with the practised calm of getaway drivers returning the loot.
It was a severe alert. Very high risk of wildfires nationally, it said. No firepits, no garden incinerators, no fireworks, and under no circumstances a barbecue.
Every family in Britain used to contain an uncle of a very particular sort. Call him Derek. Forty Rothmans a day, a good number of them in bed, and yet, to be entirely fair to him, the finest domestic smoke alarm network in the Home Counties.
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