Dressed up warm, my woolly hat all but over my eyes and snug as a bug in my open- topped incubator, sets off Old Bamps wondering aloud if Cressroads’ Mr Page was born ahead of his due-date?

“A neighbour on the wrong side of the tracks for Alresford-on-Arle’s Watercress Line,” explains silver-haired Bampy. “Our town’s Willy Page! Who rose once upon a time to the rank of Lollipop Man attending Sun Hill Junior School’s mums and their under-11s crossing Jacklyn’s Lane. But who remains mostly averse to turning over a new leaf for him otherwise to weather life’s storm.

“Like no-one has ever seen him indoors or out, hot or cold, bedtime or breakfast without he’s wearing his woolly hat. But not a tradition he seems able to pass down his chapter of the town’s Page-line to his kids of all ages.”

“Thanks for the memory and another of your misplaced cot-side thoughts,” sighs my mum. “Will you find out about the fire-that-could-have-been, or is that better left to me?” she asks her dad, alias my bamps.

Mum, headed home from my afternoon feed, can report back to him: “Well, after we heard the alarms go off, and watched through a porthole from behind closed doors across the corridor from the Special Care Baby Unit as fire crews entered to make safe the area, nurses explain to me how it was all on account of an electrical fault.

“A fault occurred in the older of two washing machines housed in the utility closet outside of the Nursery area, and was the cause of fumes that called for the breaking of glass to trigger a fire alarm signalling the need for a seven-engine response to Llantrisant’s Royal Glamorgan.”

But dubbed The Camilla, overhears Bamps.

Why because it is centred between Merthyr Tydfil’s 434-bed Prince Charles Hospital, where underfed kids from the local council estate sneak into the children’s department for their square meal of some days; and Bridgend’s Princess of Wales Hospital, where ITV’s Undress the Nation famously redesigned the uniforms of catering staff.. “And the Camilla is where Baby Charlie, an identical set of twins and Daisy-Mae were first in line for a toasting,” Bamps excites the interest of the bar at the hospital’s nearby Beefeater Inn.

For mum, over her muddy mix of Coke-and-orange, wanting to explain: “Our four babes were safely evacuated from the one unit within the hospital where, because of its non-stop need to provide vigilance, treatment and round-the-clock care of new-borns requiring the use of state of the medical art equipment, a fire drill is ever off-limits.” “Taking a real-life incident to serve also as the ten-year-old unit’s first ever fire drill,” Bamps blogs back from Wales to Cressroads, where he fully expects to extend his visit through until Easter Sunday morning. – www.blogsbody.com