Ok, so on Sunday evening I'm about ready to sit down and watch The Da Vinci Code DVD...

when Steph suddenly exclaims "Fuckin' hell, the house across the road is on fire!!". I think to myself "Bollox...can't be" but go to the kitchen window that looks out on the road in front of the house. True enough, not the corner house, but the one behind it has flames shooting from behind it, at least twice the height of the house, and lots of them. Straight away, I get onto the phone and dial the emergency services number 082 911 (managed by Vodacom) and report the incident. The daft cow on the Call Centre asks me what the street number is of the house in question, and I say to her "How the fuck do I know? I don't live there! Get a fire engine here, quick!" So I give her the rest of the directions to the house and grab my keys to go out and see if there's anything I can do. Steph gets on the phone and asks Brian from next door to come out and help too...good idea. Brian and I head across the road, and find the owner (an Indian fella) starting to reverse cars down the driveway, away from the flames...another good idea, get all flammable (and explosive) objects away, asap. I ask the fellas wife, who's busy walking down the driveway with the housemaid, if there's anyone else in the house, to which she replies no, if the power is still on to the house, to which she replies no, and tell them to stand at the entrance to the driveway as far away from the flames as possible. I tell them that we have called the fire brigade to reassure them that something is happening. I had some brief fire training a few years ago, and that was all I could really remember to ask and say at the time...middle age memory loss is a fuckin' horrible thing, I tell ya. So I go walking round to the back of the house to find the whole backyard illuminated by the flames, which are coming from the roofing joining the main house to an outside room (looks like it was a garage converted to a living quarters) and what, already, is left of a wooden wendy house and various home appliances and other bits and pieces. The wendy house is about 3 feet away from the outside room and the heat is causing the paint to peel from the walls as well as the rafters to spontaneously combust, flames are still shooting high into the air and I ask the fella if there's a hosepipe or something we could use while the fire brigade gets here, to which he shows me a hose that has water flowing from it, but which is running all over the garden instead of the flames. I move to pick up the hose, about 10m away, only to find that the garden isn't grassed, but instead is covered in thorns. In my haste to get over the road, I hadn't put shoes on and now ended up paying dearly for it. Brian was also barefoot and I shouted to him to stay out of the area. My feet are covered in hundreds of v-shaped thorns, not big, but painful enough to cause discomfort and I scrape my feet along a sandy patch to try and get rid of them. Most of the thorns I get out, but some are in quite deep and I have to re-focus on the hose and the fire. After about 10mins, I manage to get it more or less under control and can hear the fire engine off in the distance. It turns out they took a wrong turn and, instead of peeling off left at the circle to our area, they went straight and came to a cul-de-sac. Try turning a 12m long fire engine around in a narrow street in a hurry...doesn't work, and added a few minutes onto their arrival time. Anyway, the firemen eventually get there, I tell them that they need to check the outside room roof as it is still smouldering and now and then reignites due to the heat, and make my way down to the driveway to try and get rid of the rest of the thorns. The fella introduces himself and shakes my hand, thanking me for the help. "What help?", I asked myself. He'd fucked off and wasn't to be found to tell me more about the roof or what was in the wendy house at the time it went "poof". It was probably an appliance, like an iron or something, that had fallen over and burned some or other combustible material, but that was up to the firemen to investigate. The fella starts coughing and the paramedics (it's standard here that paramedics follow a fire engine to a scene) ask if anyone's hurt. I tell them the fella must have a bad smokers cough as he was, at no time that I could remember, close enough to the fire to have inhaled smoke from it. She smiles and heads off to feed him some oxygen. Damn, I should have had some myself...gives you a great high, does pure oxygen. I walked back to the house, stopping now and then to pull another thorn from my feet, said goodnight to Brian and went in for a shower to get washed of the soot that had covered me from top to toe. By then, all that was left to do was have a little scotch, as it was 22h30 and no time left to watch the Da Vinci Code...ah well, it'll keep for another night when there's fuckall on the telly...