It’s 30 years to the day since a fireman tried to smash my front door down at 3am.
I was renting a ground-floor flat in a converted house, and while I slept, the two floors above me were ablaze.
After being rebuffed by a woman, one of the young tenants upstairs had decided to kill himself by stuffing a newspaper into an electric fire, only to change his mind and phone the fire brigade.
In the end, he and his flatmates were rescued, clinging to a top-floor window by their fingertips. It was a close call.
I was technically homeless for a while, since water from the fire engines had crashed through a ceiling, but truth be told, I’d never been so happy to be alive.
This was an extraordinary epiphany – a pre-Christmas revelation, if you like – that, among other things, prompted me to travel the world as soon as I had the chance.
It’s easy to forget what a gift life is. As I said five years later, during my one attempt at stand-up comedy, “I didn’t need an analyst, I needed an arsonist.”
The photo, by the way, shows me and the late Ronnie Turnbull, editor of the weekly Hexham Courant newspaper, in 1994.
Ronnie, my boss, let me stay at his family home in the week leading up to Christmas 1993 while I arranged emergency B&B accommodation with the council.
At one point he even ironed one of my work shirts, growling: “Don’t tell anybody about this.”
Which was another fringe benefit, if I’m honest.
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