These darkening nights, pitch black and more often than not with a howling storm outside, we have turned once again to Bram Stoker.

We never stay away from his Dracula for long, it’s far too compelling. He would approve of the new audiograph which sits between us and tells his story, all night long.

We call it an iPhone.

We share his delight in modern technology, even if his was a good deal less modern than ours.

The other morning I woke to a moment of droll humour. I’m not sure if Stoker meant it to be that way.

It goes thus: the tall upright young men in charge are preoccupied elsewhere, clearing up the rum business of a solicitor who has gone out of his wits in service to the Count. Meanwhile, Nosferatu makes his bid for Mina.

He comes to the room adjacent to the asylum, where she sleeps. Doors hold no challenge for him, and he claims her effortlessly.

Gothic, chilling stuff. A true prince of darkness, he can outwit these puny do-gooding vampire-hunters with one bony batwing tied behind his back.

With one glorious exception.

He’s had a bit of what we call around here, a ‘paddy’. He’s gone into the office of dashing psychiatrist Dr Seward, from whence anti-undead operations are being coordinated. He’s smashed all that hi-tech stuff Bram loves so much, including the precious phonographs which record the group’s progress.

The place is an undisciplined mess: the result of an undead tantrum.

Lord Arthur, young bereaved lover of the undead Lucy, tells the group: “He had been there, and though it could only have been for a few seconds, he made rare hay of the place. All the manuscript had been burned, and the blue flames were flickering amongst the white ashes. The cylinders of your phonograph too were thrown on the fire, and the wax had helped the flames.”

Reliant as these scientific gentlemen are on empirical evidence and carefully drawn conclusions, losing this information at such a sensitive time could be catastrophic.

Dr Seward comes to the rescue.

“Thank God”, he assures the group, “There is another copy in the safe.”

Not so bright after all.

The six-hundred-year old undead supernatural lord of darkness has forgotten to check the safe.

It may have been 5:30 in the morning, but the slip made me laugh out loud. It’s ok, Nosferatu, I thought, we all make mistakes.

Me most of all. If mistakes are opportunities, my life is one great wide-open opportunity. And the worst ones are the ones which, unlike the dashing band of Vampire hunters, have no contingency plan. There is, to put it bluntly, no safety net.

Like the day I managed to arrive at the wrong church to play the entry music on my flute for my deputy editor’s wedding. I had left just a hair’s breadth of time to correct my error. With seconds to spare I made it, but the bride looked understandably as if she had been plugged in.

Or the day – or rather, hen night – I dropped the car keys down the back of the bookcase when I was supposed to be driving the 70 miles back home for my own wedding. No spare set of keys. Someone had to be despatched on the 140-mile-round-trip to come and collect myself and my long-suffering sister.

Sticking with the car keys theme, we  lost all but one set for our family car, and never got new ones cut, thus leaving us without a contingency. I went for a walk and dropped the keys out of my pockets. Three circuits of the forest later, I had to resort to paying an unearthly amount of money to a man in a white van to program a new set for me.

Or how about the hamster I took to my first joint abode in Kent, only to let it escape and never to see it again from that day until this? Round here that’s worth a £150 fine. If boy hamster meets girl hamster, the whole place could have been overrun.

However romance never did blossom, and I know this, because unlike a famous estate in the Midlands, Kentish men are not nailing up hamster pelts in caveman-style shows of hamster hunting prowess.

I work without safety net, and I’m sure it gives me grey hairs.

But a certain Ralph Waldo Emerson has come along on his white charger to rescue me with a few well-chosen lines.

He says: “A good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.”

Now I know this applies to lawyers, and I am not one. But I was very taken with the idea that leaving enough contingency is not the ultimate skill when one is fighting for another human being.

No: it is the amount of elbow grease he puts in to get one out of a scrape.

Perfect.

I am reminded of a fabled film character. If I didn’t know American history, I would have said Emerson was offering a critique of one of the best courtroom comedies of all time.

My Cousin Vinny (1992)  follows two young New Yorkers who are travelling through Alabama when a series of unlikely events lands them squarely in the frame for murder.

Lawyers are expensive, but there’s one in the family. It becomes painfully clear that he has no experience at all, and the lives of the boy are in his hands.

The man can’t even find a decent suit. He rubs the eminent Alabama judge up the wrong way, and he doesn’t know the first thing about court room etiquette.

But he has raw, canny drive. And, it has to be said, a very clever girlfriend indeed.

Between them, they use their knowledge of car mechanics to win the day.

Vinny gives me hope. I wear that fictional character as an emblem. Because being the sort of person who allows contingency is only half the story.

I can wear the wrong clothes, say the wrong things , annoy the wrong people, and work with a miniscule amount of contingency: but what really matters, when it comes to the bottom line, is getting someone out of a scrape.

Or words to that effect.