Last week's front page of the Hampshire Chronicle was dominated by a picture taken during a spectacular fire in a flat in Winchester. The dramatic photo shows a fireman up a ladder helping a man down from a balcony. Putting aside the subject matter, what made it especially impressive visually was that the mainly grey and white colours of the smoke, windows and ladder were contrasted with the bright primary colours of the fireman's yellow equipment and the rescued man's red shorts and blue top.

This man, according to the report, got straight out of bed and onto the balcony. I don't want to make light in any way of the situation he found himself in and I'm very glad he was unharmed. Nevertheless I couldn't help thinking there is a small lesson in the photo.

It is that we should at all times be ready for the emergency that will expose our underwear to the world, and we might prefer to be seen in a colourful t-shirt and shorts than baggy y-fronts and an old string vest. Remember what your mum always used to say about wearing clean underwear in case you ended up in hospital? I am taking particular note, since I usually sleep naked.

We often don't want to think about what can go wrong in life. Only three in ten of us have made a will and even less have life insurance. The rest of us obviously don't think we're going to die any time soon or we don't care.

In business we are expected to plan for emergencies and have a disaster recovery plan. A disaster is often not quite so bad if you run a big business because if one branch burns down, you have dozens of others or if a key manager leaves, at least there's a department of people to carry on the work. For small shops, it's a different story. An event that can cause difficulty for a large company can be fatal for a small one. Insurance is never enough to cover the hole in turnover left by the loss of all your stock or your premises, there isn't someone to fall back on if you're a one or two person business, and a major customer going bust can be a death blow.

Even so, we can all mitigate disaster by the simple steps of having at least some insurance, sharing knowledge with others, carrying out safety checks and storing duplicate records elsewhere or on an internet cloud.