Quick, call the fire brigade! Mabel can’t find her shoes

SATURDAY nights are uneventful in our house. A marathon TV session watching something appropriate for four children aged five to 13 limits your evening fun, as does choosing something to eat on which all six of us agree.

We spend the night arguing over X Factor versus Casualty and thick-cut oven chips versus thin and crispy ones.

Usually, nothing more exciting than next door’s giant cat making a guest appearance in our lounge ever happens.

When the children were smaller and had proper bed times, Saturday night was more entertaining. Not up there with pre-children days, obviously, when Mr Candy and I would go ‘out, out’, as we called it then, but a bit more of an event to look forward to.

With small children we had a definite ‘adult time’ (did someone say wine time?), post bathing and story reading, and after repeated trips up stairs to turn on various lights, check behind curtains for vampires or deliver just-the-right temperature milk.

Now they’re older, no one goes to bed any more on Saturday and the only people who leave the lounge of an evening are the ones letting the pizza man in. And I’m often the first one up the ‘wooden hill to Bedfordshire’, as my gran used to say.

But this Saturday a ripple of excitement shook the predictable routine of family life. Events took a surreal turn and I found myself in our kitchen with a giant wolfhound and a Spanish stranger.

We had friends visiting for dinner, a rare occurrence, and our six children were having a pizza picnic in the garden as we attempted conversation over a more adult meal (all of us secretly wondering if it was rude to turn the telly on?).

Then the door-bell rang and Rita, the neighbour’s housesitter and their enormous pizza-loving dog Java arrived.

Rita had locked herself out dog-walking and wanted to vault over our back garden wall into her back garden to go through the possibly unlocked back door, a feat even Olympic gymnast Max Whitlock would have thought twice about.

As the kids began their chorus of ‘Can we get a dog?’, and Java helpfully hoovered the lawn of pizza crusts, it became clear Rita was going to be locked out for some time.

Now what’s the polite thing to do here?

It was 10pm. An awkward pause hung in the air as Rita informed us no one else had keys: just her and the owners holidaying in Australia. Did we offer the unusual pair a bed for the night?

Both husbands offered to get a ladder and climb through a barely open top-floor window. Then they realised they weren’t Jason Bourne and we reminded them the beer-drunk-versus-therungs-to-climb ratio probably wasn’t advisable.

The remains of our ‘adult dinner’ went cold and we hovered nervously around the table.

Mabel asked to ride Java and Rita was clearly wondering why a five-year-old was still up. ‘It’s the holidays,’ I mumbled.

An hour passed and Rita said she had an idea. She disappeared off outside, leaving Java with us. These days I attribute any strange behaviour from strangers as probably being something to do with Pokemon Go, but I couldn’t see how Java would be involved in that; he was far too sensible.

We all looked at each other and we all looked at Java wagging his tail in what could be his new home for all I know. Had we just been tricked into adopting a huge grey furball?

An hour later, Rita arrived back, shortly followed by a fire engine. Now I don’t know what you have to tell the fire brigade when you call it out, but if it is as simple as ‘my keys are inside’, then I am putting them on speed dial for domestic emergencies.

The smallest won’t wear matching shoes? Call the fire brigade. My teenager won’t take her headphones off while I am talking to her? Mabel is refusing all green food? They could be extremely useful.

The brigade managed to get Rita and Java in and I went to bed later than usual on a Saturday night to Google ‘999 numpties’. Squirrels stuck in cups, a kitten trapped in a bongo drum are just two of the reasons to pick up the phone apparently.

The fire brigade are my new heroes. Lorraine candy is editor in chief of elle magazine.