Do try not to get your penis stuck in a toaster.

It sounds barmy doesn't it, the London Fire Brigade telling people about men putting their genitals where they shouldn't? But the fact of the matter is people put body parts in strange places all the time, get stuck, and then call us out to release them. We're not just talking one or two; our crews have been called out to over 1,300 "unusual" incidents since 2010 – that's more than one a day. Granted, they're not all penis-related, but some are very silly: people with loo seats on their heads, a man with his arm trapped in a portable toilet, adults stuck in children's toys, someone with a test tube on his finger. And a lot of handcuffs. More than 25 people call us out every year to release them from these. I don't know whether it's the Fifty Shades effect or not, but I can tell you this, most are Fifty Shades of Red by the time we turn up in a big, red fire engine with our equipment to cut them out. We launched our campaign, #FiftyShadesofRed, in a bid to highlight some of the less conventional incidents we've attended over the past few years.

By Dave Brown / more