1637: Fire

Fell asleep with the TV on last night and woke up an hour or two later in that slightly confused manner where you’re sure something’s wrong, but not quite sure what.

In this case, it took me a little while to determine what had woken me up and felt “off”. We had the fan on in the bedroom, so there was a certain degree of background noise anyway, but it seemed a little too loud. At first I thought it was the television, but after my vision cleared from the murk of sleep, I realised the television was off.

What was this loud noise? I got up to investigate. Andie was fast asleep so, taking care not to wake her up, I took a look out of the window and, upon opening the curtains — we have heavy blackout curtains in our bedroom — was almost blinded by the flashing blue lights of some sort of emergency vehicle.

After blinking a few times to get my sense of sight back, I could see through the glare of the lights that there were two fire engines in the street. They had floodlights trained on something over the road from our house, and there were people standing in the street.

I couldn’t quite work out what was going on and didn’t really want to go out and rubberneck, but it was clear that something fairly major had happened. My first thought was that a loud domestic argument Andie had heard earlier had escalated into something serious, but then I figured the police would be in attendance as well.

I couldn’t see what was going on, and by the relatively calm movements and conversation of the firemen it seemed like the most serious business had already concluded. Indeed, it wasn’t long before one of the two fire engines departed, but the other stayed for a while.

I eventually went back to sleep since nothing much seemed to be going on and our house didn’t appear to be in any particular danger.

This morning, though, it was abundantly clear what had happened. The block of flats over the road from us had a huge scorch mark up the side of it, and the block’s rubbish area — which, earlier in the day, had had a discarded bed and mattress in it — was now little more than a pile of ash.

We happened to run into one of our neighbours on the way out to the shop, who said that it seemed like someone had set the fire deliberately. She didn’t seem to have any real evidence for this save for the fact she’d seen it happen before elsewhere, but it seems like a plausible explanation.

So that’s that, really, and that’s the reason I’ve been extremely tired all day! Thankfully no-one appeared to be hurt and the building wasn’t damaged, either, so all is well. Nothing like a bit of drama to keep things interesting though, eh?