WARNING: Reading this column could damage your health. So, for that matter, could ironing your trousers, particularly if you're still wearing them, and never underestimate the perils posed by toilet roll holders and sponges.

In those bygone days when I was getting shot at and rocketed in Vietnam, I dreamed of the comforts and safety of home. Now it appears life and limb were less endangered in a foxhole at Khe Sanh than at my cottage on Mill Lane in England's leafy Midlands.

I've just finished reading a report from Britain's Department of Trade and Industry that suggests home is a minefield of magazines and beanbags and talcum powder and socks and armchairs and teapot covers, all disasters waiting to send me off to the hospital.

Certainly I am no stranger to the pitfalls that lie in wait for the domestically unwary. Elizabeth, she who must be obeyed around the Webb household, once managed to turn a 30-buck do-it-yourself wallpapering job into a $742 lesson in why the Yellow Pages exist.

(I let her talk me into letting her wallpaper the bathroom rather than hiring some cowboy from the local pub who would charge three times as much. She took a tumble that cost hundreds in chiropractic bills, the bathroom wall resembled the work of a demented artist and we still had to pay the pub cowboy a couple of hundred to put it right.)

But the catalog of catastrophes outlined by the government bean counters goes far beyond the sort of mishap that my wife experienced over a little honest effort at DIY, which involved a calculated risk.

Rather, it prompted me to wonder how mankind ever managed to invent hop-scotch, ride a bicycle or even find its collective butt with both hands, let along send men to the moon.

The report from the Home and Leisure Accident Surveillance System is a recitation of what can happen when people with IQs about two points above those of a duck-billed platypus come face to face with dust pans, bread boxes, birdbaths and the like.

Take, for example, the 29-year-old lady who was rushed to a hospital with thigh and leg burns. It seems she tried to iron a pair of trousers while she was still wearing them. Or the 46-year-old man who dislocated his finger when it got caught in the waistline of the trousers he was trying to pull on.

In fact, mishaps with trousers sent 5,949 to British hospitals in 1999, 800 more silly cases than the year before. Other items of apparel kept the medics busy. Socks and tights proved a menace to 10,773 folks, while 5,615 fell afoul of those tricky bits of footwear, rubber boots.

How do they do it? How can 311 people come to grief over birdbaths? What are they doing - high dives into the things from rooftops? Tripping over them while doing fertility dances to the light of the midnight moon?

I'm also a bit more than mildly curious as to how 329 supposedly sane people were forced to visit hospitals after painful encounters with toilet roll holders. The government's report doesn't explain, so maybe it's best that our sensibilities are spared the, ah, details.

A lady named Jane Eason, of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, opines as how all these attacking birdbaths and toilet roll holders and sponges and loofahs (966 victims claimed) in the supposed safety of our own homes is "worrying."

Worrying? Commonplace items are becoming to home dwellers what triffids were to gardening, or frogs were to the Egyptian countryside in Moses's day, or the locusts that made Brigham Young's folks' lives such a misery.

Miss Jane's companion at the accident prevention society (which really doesn't seem to be doing much of a job), one Roger Vincent, says "we never cease to be amazed by the way in which people manage to injure themselves." Do tell.

It is patently clear that some people should be banned from living in houses or apartments, for their own good. Then again, these are the same sort of birth control failures who get banged on the head by meteorites or sunburn from the Northern Lights.

The roll call of the lame and halt on the home front goes on - those injured by armchairs (16,662), by bread boxes (91) and talcum powder, the stuff of 73 mishaps. Run-ins with tree leaves accounted for another 1,171 hospital cases.

Rat poison more understandably sent 439 people to the A and E, and meat cleavers accounted for another 329, but those were drops in the bloody bucket compared with the 1,317 people that were done in by beanbags.

If you have gotten this far in reading this column, then be afraid - be very, very afraid. In Britain, accidents with printed publications landed 4,371 people in hospital rooms and wards. Chainsaws are mathematically safer, but they are hard to print on.

Ah, well, such is human nature, which really doesn't amount to much at times. For some reason, this rather sorry report reminded me of the chap in California who somehow conned a jury into awarding him several billion bucks from a tobacco company because he caught lung cancer.

This gent apparently was off on an extended holiday to the planet Zog during the 1980s and '90s when the rest of us were being driven to distraction by constant warnings about the dangers of smoking. He insisted he hadn't heard the warnings.

He seems to be among a lot of folks for whom common sense has definitely gone walkabout. The government should now confiscate their birdbaths, toilet roll holders and sponges. For the rest, be careful of cigarette warnings, particularly in print.

Thought for the Week: If a halo slips a few inches, it is called a noose.

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