Early start

It's a terrible picture, but then it was a pretty horrible experience.

The building fire alarms went off at about 4.10am, and I made my usual visit to the balcony to see what was happening. There was a lot of scurrying around down in the courtyard and I could see the people who are our "waking watch" in hi vis jackets marked fire steward. I couldn't see any smoke, but it was obvious this was not a usual case. I chivvied Mr A up, and we got dressed and went down. Unfortunately, we got separated because I misheard what he said when I thought he'd said "don't wait", he'd actually said "do wait". Anyway, by the time I got to the courtyard the fire engines were already there, and there was smoke coming out of the garage.

This has happened before, but this was a bit worse. It turned out to be a fire in a single car at the back of our garage, whereas last time it was a single car that was brought near our garage and was torched by those who stole it and then the smoke blew through our garage. But there was no significant risk the fire could have caught hold in the building, whereas that was not true about this case. The fire could easily have taken hold amongst other cars, and also taken hold in the building. It wasn't near our part of the building, but it was still a near miss and it's not a good feeling. Thank goodness we do have this waking watch, although there have been messages on our building message board about people in hi vis jackets taking pictures of cars in the garage and behaving in an apparently furtive manner. The police apparently think this could be arson. As I said, not a good feeling.

Unfortunately, we were out in the car park for about an hour, so while I managed to get back to bed for a while and did get warm again, it was not a good experience.

Not much else of interest has happened today. At least, not in comparison to this.