THE perils of reheating rice that’s been left out overnight were brought uncomfortably home to me this week when I succumbed to a bout of Gippy Tummy.

I’ve given it capital letters because that’s how horrible it was.

On my birthday, of all days.

Thus prevented from taking full advantage of the menu of delights lined up by my ever-thoughtful husband , I spent the afternoon plonked on a garden chair, feeling sorry for myself.

But I was fortunate to be able to do even that, given the narrow escape I had a couple of weeks ago.

There I was, pootling up a gentle incline between Dorchester and Blandford at 50mph on a Sunday teatime, when – and now I really understand the phrase ‘from out of nowhere’ – a car hurtled round a bend towards me, its rear swinging out wildly, zoomed straight across the road right in front of me, into a hedge, up and over it, and then rolled four or five times before coming to rest in a field.

Surprised? I’ll say! One second further up the road and he’d have been in my driver’s door.

However, I didn’t lose my presence of mind but pulled over and called the emergency services before seeing what I could do to help. One man had a head wound but, miraculously, there were no serious injuries.

It was an hour later when I left the scene. Two policemen were there, but an ambulance had not arrived.

So I wasn’t really astonished to read of the 1 hour 23 minute wait for paramedics endured by a 92-year-old woman who fell and hit her head on a Salisbury pavement a couple of days later.

I do hope she has recovered.

“Exceptionally high demand” was blamed by the ambulance service in her case. I don’t doubt it. I’m absolutely sure the crews and controllers do their best in very trying circumstances – such as listening to me on the phone, flagging down drivers to ask them where exactly I was.

“Frontline operational vacancies” are said to be a significant problem, as is rising demand, with call-outs up almost 10 per cent in a year.

But a new method of assessing calls is being trialled, with encouraging results.

In all except obviously life-threatening cases, it gives handlers an extra couple of minutes to decide how to deploy their resources most effectively before the ‘target response time’ clock starts ticking.

I’m just thanking my lucky stars that I wasn’t one of their caseload, and I’m reviewing some targets of my own – in the kitchen hygiene department.

anneriddle36@gmail.com