How I nearly died for this blog... (some hyperbole may apply)

Dear Reader,

you will not be aware of this, but on Saturday last, on a beautiful sunny day in Dublin town, I nearly died. And it's all your fault.

Yes, there I was, sitting down in the relative comfort of the modern picture house, finding comfort in the midday dusk of Screen 13. Given that it was my 37th visit to this hallowed temple this year, you can imagine that nothing seemed out of the ordinary, and indeed the reels started reeling, the seat cushions suppressed silent farts, and the stench of popcorn filled the air. "I am home", I thought, settling in for some antipodean adventure with Tomorrow, When the War Began.

The review of this film will follow quickly, but in case you've never heard of it, it's basically Red Dawn meets the Southern Cross, and about 20 minutes in, there's a scene where the frolicking teens fall asleep while a number of planes fly overhead, signaling the beginning of an invasion by foreign agitators.

And right at this moment, with no dialogue, rather some soulful shots of snoozing sweet sixteeners, a voice began to announce in passionless and unthreateningly calm British tones:

Attention, attention please. This is an emergency, please leave the cinema and find the nearest exit.

This continued, as those soaring planes filled the Aussie skies with impending danger of all out war, yet no lights turned on, and the film kept playing. "What a bold choice this director has made," I thought, "Adding this ironic voice-over to lend this standard fare a sense of bitter realism. So clever, so daring, so interesting...". 

And I wasn't the only one. It was a further five minutes before we naïve audience members realised that this was not a drill, that an engulfing inferno had instead overtaken the popcorn concession stand of Cineworld, Parnell St. Lead to the exit by power-mad ushers who finally had something to do, ours was the last screen to evacuate the building, amid stares of concern, but more stares of patronising incredulity that we had ignored the alarm for so long.

Anyway, so the inferno turned out to be a rather insignificant number of flames spewing from the popcorn machine. And no one was injured, and the cinema didn't even have to close for the rest of the day.

But still... I have felt death's icy grip tingling my spine, and were it not for the dulcet tones of the British fire alarm...