I WAS feeling pretty pleased with my interlinked smoke and heat alarms until I tried to start reading the instructions. I had ordered them in good time (well, in the nick of time, anyway), paid what seemed like a fair price and was confident that all I needed to do was switch them on and stick them onto my ceilings. I could get that done in half an hour yesterday morning, I figured, leaving plenty of time to digest the long-awaited Sue Gray report in the afternoon.

Reading Gray’s “update” only took me about 10 minutes in the end, but reader, my new fire safety system is still not up.

There’s a guddle of alarms, instructions and sticky pads on my dining table and my ears can’t take any more beeping for the time being.

The smoke alarms were definitely linked at one point – when I pressed the test button on either one, the other soon joined in the chorus – but the heat alarm remained stubbornly silent. I know they are theoretically compatible as I bought them as a bundle. But now I’m stumped.

To start with it seemed simple enough: “For any device in the group, long press the button, the green light flashes after 3 seconds, and then a long beep after three flashes.” As a pedant, I was perturbed by both the sentence structure and the inconsistency of style (why “3 seconds” but “three flashes”?) but did my best to put such quibbles aside and focus on counting beeps and flashes. Then, bamboozled, I stopped trying to count flashes and focused on beeps.

There were green lights. There were red lights. If you’ve watched Squid Game, you’ll appreciate why my anxiety was mounting.

But I persevered.

I succeeded in unlinking the two alarms, albeit I was not rewarded with the promised single beep and three slow green flashes for doing so. All three are now turned off, so I’ve gone back to square one.

The point I’m trying to make isn’t that I’m a simpleton – that would be for others to judge – but that sourcing and ordering was only half the battle here. As I was reading up on the new regulations and researching my options, I wondered why the Scottish Government couldn’t have just ordered alarms meeting the new standards in bulk and sold them on to owner-occupiers. That way, perhaps the instruction leaflets could have been in proper English and indeed other languages, and contained links to videos demonstrating what to do.

The obvious comparison is with the imported lateral flow tests we’ve been grappling with during the pandemic. It was a tall order for every adult in the UK to train themselves in carrying out important medical tests, especially when we aren’t even guaranteed that our next testing kit will contain the same bits and bobs (or instructions) as the last. Many people surely struggled a great deal with this, especially those with physical or learning disabilities, but given the circumstances we all had to muddle through.

The pandemic also highlighted glaring shortcomings in government communications, with members of the public expected to quickly grasp the meaning of new concepts such as “social distancing” and “self-isolation” and to go to great lengths looking up the rules applicable to their particular family circumstances when a single dynamic website could have made all of this possible with a handful of clicks. To those new and vitally important concepts we can now add “interlinked alarms”, with the government and media bearing equal responsibility for failing to effectively communicate what this actually means. Scan the media coverage of the new fire safety law and you’ll see all sorts of costs mentioned – £300, £400, even £500 for having the right kit installed. You’d be forgiven for assuming that “interlinked” must mean wired in by an electrician – why else would these “up to” costs be so high?

The Daily Record ran a story last month headed “Scots gran spends £300 installing new smoke alarms after panicking about controversial law”, and having read it three times I still can’t fathom what point the reporter was trying to make. The suggestion seems to be that this lady spent too much, or even that she didn’t need to spend anything as she “already had working alarms”. This sort of coverage does little to inform the public about what steps they should be taking, and risks suggesting that anyone replacing their alarms is some sort of mug.

Those who are unable to climb a ladder will, of course, have to either spend a bit more money or enlist the help of family or friends with the installation, but many of those on low incomes will likely have seen £300, £400 or £500 mentioned and researched no further.

Once again, a dynamic website would have been much more helpful than an array of static press releases and fact sheets from the Scottish Government. But really, in the ordinary course of events, should the average person really be expected to train themselves up in domestic health and safety? The pandemic was an exceptional situation, and shouldn’t be seen as a template for ongoing self-sufficiency. Here’s hoping I can get my alarms linked and, more importantly, that media reports and instruction leaflets don’t put others off even trying.