Ever nipped out of your back door just as the mountain of jelly, prepared for your niece’s birthday, reacts with your Dad’s fungal foot cream and explodes all over your kitchen? No? Well perhaps you’ve been chased across a rugby pitch by a genetically modified giant badger and being rescued thanks to a blindside flanker who happened to spot the incident when he popped back to collect his dismembered left ear?

Really? Never?

Well my friends, it sounds to me like you’ve never been in a classic ‘narrow squeak’ situation.

That’s no bad thing of course.

I had one such escape this week and let me assure you, I feel absolutely peachy to have slithered out all limbs in tact.

Once again, I allowed a chum to set me up with a young gent. Now, these blind date scenarios can be a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to results, so, erring on the sharp edge of caution, I asked said pal to put me in touch with my potential love match so we could have a natter on the old blower before we actually committed to meet. So that is exactly what we did…and very well it went too. We spoke for a good 47 minutes 23 seconds about all manner of things and seemed to get on like the proverbial cheese and pickle. Ending the call with an arrangement to meet on the following Sunday I popped the receiver back in its cradle with visions of songbirds and pink rose-petals fluttering through my mind – maybe, just maybe, this fellow was ‘the one’.

Well isn’t it just like Beelzebub himself to come and poke his beak in whenever love tries to make an entrance. Come Sunday I felt absolutely dire. My onion throbbed, my throat felt like a barrel of rusty pins and as for my tummy, well, dear reader, some things are best left understated so lets just say it ‘wasn’t good’

It was all I could do to raise an index digit and text said chap with the apologetic news that I felt near to Heaven’s pearly gates and ask if he minded if I slipped under the rope on this one and postponed until the following week.

Oh yes, he really did mind.

You would have thought I’d suggested feasting upon the rotting spleen of his long dead grandmother! The torrent of anger that he displayed in his return message was the stuff of nightmares! Gordon Ramsey would have struggled to match his swears!

Of course I didn’t reply. Mainly because I was too busy fighting off the Grim Reaper who had knocked at my door in the form of this silly bug, but once I had recovered I actually had cause to thanks the little germs that had so infected me. If I had not fallen ill I would have happily gone along to meet this nut–job, completely oblivious to the fact I was on a date with the spawn of Satan himself.

A squeak, I’m sure you’ll agree, of the very narrowest kind.

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