Harmattan is also a fire season: eleven checks before the dry nights peak

Between December and February the humidity collapses, everything in the house becomes tinder-grade, and the same faults that shrug off risk in the wet months stop shrugging. This is the harmattan fire walk-through - not fear, inventory.

Twenty minutes, top to bottom

• Charging things off the floor. Phone and torch chargers on a mattress, a curtain's reach, or a plastic surface: move them to a hard, clear spot - and never leave a battery charging on a bed while the room is empty, whatever the month.
• The heater's one-metre rule. Anything electric that glows or blows heat gets one metre of empty air on every side, away from the curtain that has started pooling near it, and off the rug. The dryer rack is not a heater.
• Extension bars and their daisy-chain. One heater on one bar, on its own, and check the bar's rating while you're there - a chain of bars feeding a heating load through a thin cable is how harmattan house-fires start in a room that felt tidy.
• Cooking with windows open, the burn risk of. Harmattan wind plus a small flame behind a window someone closed means a draught moving a curtain; tie the curtain, move the curtain, or cook with the window the other room opens to.
• Candles and torches - the season's own habit. Outages mean light that has a flame in it. Every candle needs a metal or ceramic base on a shelf nothing above can fall onto; a candle in a jar of water on a windowsill is free and wind-proof. The rechargeable torch with a fresh bulb is the whole solution, so make sure it has one.
• The ceiling fan's dust. Thick dust on fan blades is fuel with a motor attached - in the dry months it can burn just from heat and friction; wipe the blades and listen for the smell of a warming motor while you're on the ladder.
• Stored dry goods and paper. Cardboard corners, newsprint for wrapping, the kerosene lamp fuel (if you keep one) - all of it moves away from the electrical panel, the heater's corner and the kitchen stove line. Kerosene lives outside the kitchen, sealed, in a container with a lid.
• Smoke alarm, if you own one: test it. If you don't: a battery alarm in the corridor outside the bedrooms is the cheapest protective device any house can hold. Put it on the wall tonight, not next month.
• Exit rehearsal, two minutes: where does everyone come out, where is the key to the gate at night (locked courtyard doors turn a small fire into a big one - keep a torch and the key on the same hook), and who calls the responder; learn the number of the nearest station with the response vehicle, not the one with the best map position.
• Bikes, gens and fuel: no generator in an enclosed space even in the cold - the same carbon monoxide that no smell warns you about is deadlier in a closed harmattan house - and no fuelling a hot engine; the residual heat finds the vapour.
• Roof-space lamp and the solar-rig charge controller: dusty connections and a controller cooking in the sun room; check both by daylight, hands off the bare terminals, eyes on the colour of the plastic.

The habit list (free, daily)

Switches off at the wall at night - the standby light on an appliance is current that never gets a holiday; heaters are off when the room is empty, chargers when people sleep. And the one sentence to repeat in a house with a courtyard gate: the way out must open faster than the fire grows. No page replaces a working alarm, a rehearsed exit, and a fire you have not started.