Routine, porridge and Shakespeare.

I'm not a person who is big into routine and order but there is one routine that I like to follow religiously; a routine that if I stick to it, ensures that my day runs smoothly and productively, but that if it goes awry heralds hours of chaos and disaster. It's my morning routine.

It starts just before six, when I wake and initially panic, thinking that I've overslept. A glance at the clock reassures me that all is on track. I lie in bed planning my day until six when the alarm goes off, then downstairs to put porridge oats and sultanas in a bowl and to make a cup of tea which I take back to bed to drink whilst I read for half an hour. Then it's up, and into the kitchen where my bowl of oats sit waiting, I pour on the milk and then put the bowl into the microwave which I set for twenty minutes on defrost.

The next step is to put a coat and a pair of trousers on over my pyjamas and take Billy dog out for a walk. If the tide is in we walk on the green, and if it's out on the beach. By the time we get home the microwave has performed its magic and the porridge has cooled to the perfect temperature to eat. Goldilocks couldn't wish for better.

Breakfast eaten its time to shower, then upstairs again to get dressed. Next its back to the kitchen to make a sandwich for lunch and grab an apple from the fruit bowl. Finally its bathroom again to clean my teeth and then back upstairs to change as I will have invariably dribbled whitening toothpaste down my top and we all know how this marks your clothes.

Then at eight or thereabouts I'm ready to leave the house to drop Billy at my Mums for the day before I head to work. My routine works like clockwork and has taken years of adjustment and fine tuning to reach this meticulous standard. It's really only when something happens to disrupt this routine that I realise how important it is. Take the other morning for example.

I awoke in a panic, oh no I'd overslept and was late for work, glance at the clock and phew all was OK. Six am alarm, then up, kitchen, porridge oats, sultanas and tea. Back to bed and had picked up my book when there was an awful noise from next-door. First there was a series of loud thuds, then a scream and then a half dozen yelps.

I live in a terrace and the sound insulation between my neighbours and myself isn't great but I've never heard such a loud scary noise. Although I couldn't see what had happened I knew immediately what those noises meant. You see our houses are small so when they were built, in order to save space, the builders put in paddle staircases. For those of you who don't know what this is, its a steeply pitched flight of stairs where each rung is only big enough for one foot and which takes up a lot less space than a more conventional staircase. They make good use of space but are steep and tricky to get used to. The neighbours on my right are new, in fact so new that I hadn't even spoken to them yet and I suspected that they still weren't completely used to the staircase. The noises that I'd heard, were I was sure, the sounds of someone falling down the stairs.

I lay in bed for a minute wondering what to do. Should I go and check that they were OK and run the risk of getting the reputation for being a nosy neighbour or should I drink my tea and read my book and let them sort it out? My mind replayed the sickening thuds and crashes and knew I had to check that all was OK. So trousers and jacket on over my pyjamas, I went next-door and knocked on the door. The door was flung open by a young woman wearing only a pair of pants.

"Help me" she cried " my boyfriend has fallen down the stairs!". She was already on the phone to the ambulance service.

So long story short, the boyfriend was lieing curled up in a foetal position at the foot of the stairs, wearing boxer shorts (have these people not heard of pyjamas?). He was conscious but said that he'd hit his head and hurt his neck and shoulder in the fall. His girlfriend was frantic and kept wanting to hold his hand, put a pillow under his head and wanted him to try and move his feet and legs. It took the ambulance about fifteen to twenty minutes to arrive and they seemed like the longest twenty minutes of my life. I'm not really designed to deal with crisis situations and felt like a cross between an iceberg and a swan: I was calm on the surface but seven eighths of me was below the icy water paddling in a frenzied way that felt horribly close to panic. I persuaded the girlfriend to get dressed and get her bag and phone etc so that she could be ready to leave with the ambulance, anything to keep her busy and stop her from trying to touch or move him. I had very strange conversations with them both, what with him lieing on the floor and her running around topless. I tried to keep them talking to keep her calm and him conscious, I've forgotten the details of what we talked about but wouldn't be surprised if I asked what their first pets were, their favourite colours and if money was no object where they'd go for a dream holiday. I have never been so pleased to see blue flashing lights in my life and was happy to let the paramedics take charge.

Back home, my tea was getting cold and my precious morning routine was irretrievably ruined. This resulted in me setting the microwave incorrectly, so got back from my walk to find my porridge had boiled all over the microwave and I had to have muesli for breakfast, I left the house late so got snarled up in traffic, I forgot my diary which I find very unnerving and for the rest of the day every spare second I had I kept remembering the sound of the fall and the almost inhuman cries that followed and could picture that poor man lieing on the floor. A really rubbish day.

However it could have been so much worse, as it turned out that my neighbour was not seriously injured, he spent the day at hospital being checked out but was home that evening. He had hurt his elbow and was sore all over, but other than that fine. So that night I was happy and relived as I cleaned the cold congealed porridge out of the microwave. Yes my day hadn't started very well, but had ended OK. I had met my new neighbours, even if the circumstances hadn't been ideal and I had seen a lot more of them than is normal at a first meeting but they were both uninjured and seemed very pleasant, despite the lack of pyjamas, I had a sparkling clean microwave and they had bought me a lovely box of chocolates as a thank you. So in the words of the bard,

"All's well that ends well".