Throwing in the towels

Not content with one freak accident, Francis busily accumulates more. He arranges to visit a factory. Hours before he sets off, it bursts into flames. He drives to Grimsby so he can share the rare beauty and magic of the dawn fish market on the docks and, that evening, feels the tremor of the UK's most vigorous earthquake for 250 years.

He baulks, though, at my suggestion that he might like to move on his own into reinforced, low level accommodation, carefully selected to avoid fault lines, tectonic plates, motorways and all materials implicated in cases of spontaneous combustion. "You could fill the place with sardines," I say. "They're definitely not on any list of hazardous materials, though I suppose you could slip on them."

Meanwhile, I have problems of my own. At school, the big xylophone is making a funny buzzing sound on the low notes. Either Francis' freak accident syndrome is catching, and it, too, is about to explode into flames, or there's something trapped inside - quite possibly the remains of an old music teacher, traumatised by one too many bracing motivational assembly chats.

"Now," says Sasha, to the school. "I want to talk to you about waste. When you dry your hands after you've been to the toilet, what do you do if you take too many paper towels?"

The children are baffled.

"I'll tell you exactly what you do," she says, voice rising scarily. "You just throw them on the floor. Creating mess. And one day, when you come in, there won't be any more, because thanks to your wasteful habits, we'll simply have run out. For ever."

There's dead silence.

"Now, here's what I want you to do. If you take too many, I want you to take all the spare ones to your teacher. They will be pleased, because there are so many things they can do with them. Like - mopping up after painting or...........

"Anyway," she continues, in a slightly hurried way. "They'll work out things to do with them. I expect they'll even put them back into the dispenser for you, if you ask nicely."

Given the general hygiene standards of the children, encouraging them to spread a merry trail of slightly used paper towels round the rest of the building seems to make about as much sense as keeping a colony of threadworm as the class pets.

The other teachers appear strangely unenthused by the notion that they might spend some of their free time carefully reinserting paper towels into a metal container so grimy that it looks as if, with just a little modification, it could provide a terrorist with a perfect starter bio-weapon.

"We need to cut down on mess," says Sasha. "Remember, a lion can choke on a plastic bag." It's the first useful piece of advice I've had all day.