The voice at the end of the phone is my sister’s, telling me that my mother has fallen on the steps outside her house and hit her head and the paramedics are with her as we speak.

Immediately my few remaining brain cells organise themselves into various factions and vie with each other to get my attention. Head injuries, shout one lot, that means concussion and fractured skulls and blood clots and… but I turn my attention to another chorus before I’m led any further down a train of thought with a very unfortunate terminus.

She’s nearly 78, this cluster reminds me. Everyone knows how dangerous falls are for elderly people. If she can fall down her own steps, think how easy it will be for her to fall out of bed once she’s in hospital. Then she’ll probably break a leg or develop pneumonia… and already that train of thought is chugging relentlessly to the final destination.

My sister, who lives ten miles from my mother, is going to meet her at the hospital and will call me again then. The paramedics, who were alerted to my mother’s plight by a very alert neighbour, are taking her in by ambulance car. The voices in my head shut up for a minute while I absorb this fact. Ambulance car. That could mean it’s not too life-threatening, then, couldn’t it? Or does it simply mean that with the budget cuts they’ve had to sell all their real, full-size, upright ambulances and settle for shoving patients in on the back seat of a Ford Galaxy instead? My sister refuses my frantic offer to jump in my car and head off for South Wales. Let’s wait and see what A & E say first, she says, sensibly. I’ll call you when I get there.

When she gets there she finds my mother looking a bit like a pirate. There’s a bandage around her head that, in the dark, looks like a huge patch over one eye.

My sister calls me. Mum is showing no signs of concussion, and says “ow” loudly when they inject a painkiller above her eyebrow before stitching her up.

She claims the fall was her own fault. She was taking cardboard to the recycling bin and, what with the combination of the dark and backless slippers over ill-fitting slipper socks, her feet and brain lost contact with each other for a moment. And she did not fall down the steps, if you don’t mind. She fell up them.

Part of me wants to be very cross indeed with my mother for turning herself into a trip hazard, but the thing that stops me venting my spleen to my husband is he will start talking about pots and kettles. Everyone in my family has the silly risks gene. It’s not unusual to turn up at my mum’s to find her rummaging round in the half-boarded loft, which she accesses by a stepladder that can probably remember the moon landing. Or balancing on another ladder, the concreted front garden 20 feet below her, trying to hang Christmas lights single-handed on the guttering. And my dad was no better. One of my earliest memories was of him doing handstands at my request at the top of our stairs. I was four and he was 40. One of my next memories was of a doctor in casualty telling him off very soundly indeed.

We can’t help ourselves. My husband, who goes through life with the enthusiasm and trepidation of a health and safety inspector, has always palled when I get out a dining chair to hang curtains, or stand on the kitchen work surface to reach a little used casserole on top the cupboard. Of course, I’m a lot more sensible these days. Like my mum, I just do it when no one else is around.

My mum phones me when my sister gets her back home. The slippers, she tells me stoutly, have gone straight in the bin. Rarely can two items of footwear have suffered such an unjustly ignominious fate.

Well, I hope she’s learned her lesson, I say to my husband. But luckily not out loud.

How is she? he asks. Okay, I say. It was just one of those unfortunate things you just can't do anything about.