One of my smoke alarms has recently been intermittently making the ‘please change my battery’ plipping noise. This morning I took it down, took out the battery, and put another one in. It didn't turn on at all.

A duff battery? Got another one out and tried that. Same thing.

Entire alarm gone dead? Put the old battery back in, and it was fine – did its ‘thank you for activating me’ triple bleep and started flashing its light.

Surely both my fresh batteries can't be dead? I put one back in and had a closer look.

On the old 9V battery, the positive terminal sticks out a little further than on either of the new ones. If I insert one of the new ones and look carefully at it, I can see that the positive contact in the battery socket isn't reaching as far as the terminal! It must have been pushed out of shape by the old battery, and isn't springing back. Gaah!

In other news, yesterday morning I walked into my bank, closed a savings account, and walked out carrying its entire contents in cash.

That felt like a very romantic thing to be doing. In fiction, it's the sort of thing people do just before quitting their tedious daily grind, leaving their home and life, and fleeing to a sunnier country never to return.

Well, quite apart from the obvious incongruity of me deliberately moving to a sunnier country, where fiction departed from reality in this case was the fact that the contents of the account totalled 22 pence, on which if I was lucky I might just about have managed to flee round the corner. In fact, I subsequently blew the whole account on a small fraction of a cup of coffee.

(It was an archaic savings account with such a useless interest rate that I hadn't been using it for real money in years, but until now I'd had to keep it open because it was the nominated account for some shares I had to pay dividends into, and nobody seemed to know how I could nominate a different account. Recently the company concerned sorted out its share management systems, so I was finally able to redirect the dividends at another account and close the obsolete one. I had of course more or less emptied the whole thing into a more sensible savings account in advance by electronic transfer, which was why only a few odd pence were left. But saying all of that spoils the fun.)

If these things must exist on the Internet, let's at least have their idiosyncratic grammar be justified.