WELL, did you? Did you rush to the cinema to watch the new "mummy-porn" movie then slap on the handcuffs once you’d hurtled, panting with desire, back home?

The release of the Fifty Shades of Grey film this weekend has been breathily anticipated for months, and not just by people who got all in a lather when the erotic romance trilogy by London mum Erika Mitchell, better known to her excitable readers as E L James, flooded onto the book market from 2011.

For, it would seem, London Fire Brigade has been getting all hot under the collar about the release of the film too.

Fire chiefs were apparently braced for a soar in calls to release haplessly amorous people stuck or trapped in would-be bondage tackle, keen to re-enact some of the film’s more saucy scenes.

Brigade bosses warned people to “think carefully” – presumably that means making sure the handcuff keys are close to hand – before getting themselves into a chained up lather then turning fifty shades of red with embarrassment.

That said, I can think of several people with a penchant for the rugged who wouldn’t mind too much if a burly fire fighter dashed to their side brandishing a pair of bolt cutters…

The brigade reckons that since the launch of the Fifty Shades books – which to the uninitiated (where on earth have you been?) explicitly chart the sexual relationship between a college graduate and a young business magnate into dominance and bondage – call-outs have steadily increased to people amorously trapped, very often in every day household items.

Mind you, I’d hardly call a pair of handcuffs an every day household item unless, of course, you’re a police officer or someone who regularly gets them snapped on your wrists for criminal misdemeanour.

But I did hear from a nurse friend of mine about someone who wound up as a casualty in their local A & E department after they apparently ‘fell over a fruit bowl’ and ended up with an apple nestled in their nether regions.

Then there was the man who needed de-flowering after he and his lover did impassioned things with a chrysanthemum.

And careful what you do with any metal rings floating around in the your tool box. One man, in a fit of ardent curiosity, put a couple on the end of his unmentionable and found that, no matter how hard he pulled (!) he couldn’t get them off. I bet he couldn’t…

Three days later, feeling desperate and in a waddling gait more usually associated with that of an ageing ostler who’s spent a lifetime astride horses – he pitched up at A & E. Casualty staff couldn’t get them off either, so they called the fire brigade, who waded in with hydraulic cutting equipment.

That in itself must have been enough to make the victim shrivel up in fear so I’m not altogether sure that the hydraulic cutters were necessary after all…


TALKING of using household items to get the juices flowing, who’d have thought a dollop of vegetable yeast extract would do the trick? Or not, depending on your point of view.

For the makers of Marmite – that stuff in the little brown jar people love or hate in equal measure – are busy developing a body paint flavoured with the stuff which they hope to have in the shops by Valentine’s Day next year.

The ‘edible spreadable’ is being devised in conjunction with a chain of sex shops who claims a growing number of customers have expressed a desire (?!) for products containing the brown sticky stuff with which to woo their paramour.

Forget handcuffs and metal rings then. Fifty shades of yeast extract is the thing to chain your lover to your side. Brings a whole new meaning to their advertising slogan doesn’t it? My mate, Marmite….