Lynne Truss on unexpected fire hazards When I was at school, I think I visited the secretary's office only once. In those days, it was quite easy to believe that, as a single mousy pupil in a school of more than 600 girls, you could slip through the entire seven years without anyone in authority ever clocking you at all. I mention this because it underlines how serious I was about needing to use the school telephone on the day I decided to break cover. Basically, I was desperate. I needed to warn my grandmother that the house was in danger of conflagration, and that it was all my fault. I will never forget the badly hidden amusement on the secretary's face as she heard me explain to my nan that I'd left a mirror on the windowsill of my bedroom, with its magnifying side facing the net curtains. If she didn't go upstairs right now and move it, a sunbeam would reflect off the mirror and then the curtains would start to smoke, and then a little hole would appear, and then the whole house would go up! Is this how magnifying mirrors actually work, vis-à-vis refracted light? Well, I have no idea. Who do you think I am? Newton? The only thing I know for a fact about lenses is a fascinating literary morsel about a mistake in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. You might remember that in Lord of the Flies, those ghastly castaway schoolboys employ Piggy's specs to light a fire. They focus sunlight onto some kindling, and then their minds naturally turn to cooking, and the next thing you know, they're peeling potatoes and succumbing to primitive bloodlust. But it has now been pointed out by outraged opticians that Piggy is short-sighted, which apparently makes his specs the wrong sort for focusing sunbeams to produce heat. Such a large authorial mistake undermines your trust in the entire narrative, I feel. But, still, it's nice to know that if you ever find yourself among the pre-pubertal survivors of a plane crash on a desert island, and you are the short-sighted one, you're actually in the clear. It's the kids who hold books at arm's length that really should be worried about being hunted down and butchered for their specs. So, anyway, why do I go on about this? Partly because I've recently recognised in myself a quite advanced Cassandra Complex - I identify totally with that poor woman in Homeland that nobody listens to, even when she consistently predicts exactly what will happen next. But also because last week, in my local paper (The Brighton Argus), I saw the worst story a neurotic person can possibly imagine. Over night, the kitchen of a well-known Brighton restaurant had been gutted by fire - and not because someone had tossed a lighted match into a wicker basket full of tissues and firelighters and then blown on it, or had even carelessly left a pair of high-prescription reading glasses on the windowsill where moonlight might be focused onto a nearby piece of flammable cheese. A heap of freshly tumble-dried tea towels was left in the kitchen to cool down - and they didn't cool down! In fact, the opposite occurred! "Heat began to build up in the centre of the mound of laundry before it suddenly exploded into flames," wrote the Argus reporter. The fire commander of Brighton was quoted as saying, "Laundry can be surprisingly dangerous. If there are still cooking fats or chemicals on tea towels, they can spontaneously combust after being dried. Obviously, I felt I should pass this information on. It's horrific. A nice warm tea towel is a fire hazard? It's like finding out that you can cut yourself with custard. But you can see why this story brought to mind my shameful phone call all those years ago. I can so easily imagine the same scene today. I'd still go and knock on the door of that scary office; I would still wait outside, compulsively gnawing the ends of my schoolgirl plaits; and then I'd have to spell my name a couple of times and explain that no, honestly, I'd been at this school for four years already, I'd just been living in the walls. And then I would make that vital call, while the secretary brayed with uncontrollable laughter. Nan! I left some tea towels in a heap! What if they heat up instead of cooling down! Nan, those tea towels might explode!