Reading this story and seeing the scumball arsonists setting fire to themselves brought back an incident I had with an idiot neighbour years ago.
I was having my dinner one night and something at the window caught my eye, mostly because we were in a first floor flat and usually nothing appeared at our window. After a glance at the window, seeing nothing, I resumed eating my dinner, then something inside caught my eye....there were three distinct lines of smoke coming up through the carpet, through gaps in the badly fitted floorboards.....fire downstairs!
I ran downstairs and hammered their door, no answer, looked through letterbox, their hall was filled with black smoke. Ran back up to our flat, grabbed my tiny fire extinguisher and my axe. Several whacks with the sharp side of the axe did nothing except leave deep marks on the yale lock, flipped the axe over and hit it full force with the back of the axe and the door burst open to reveal a hallway totally filled with thick black smoke, I lay down to try and look under the smoke, shouting the neighbours names, no answer. I ran out back door with my fire extinguisher and looked in their kitchen window, the cooker and cooker switch were well ablaze, the window was open at the top a bit so I pulled myself up and aimed the extinguisher at the fire.... 3 seconds later it was empty and it was still burning, it had slowed the fire a bit but it was still well alight. My wife had phoned the fire brigade but they seemed to be taking forever. Smoke still coming out the window like a black extrusion, my wife and daughter standing beside me as we watched, expecting our home to go up. Standing pretty helpless in my soaking wet socks as the fire brigade arrived and quickly dealt with it, the neighbour appeared beside us and told us he had put the chip pan on, discovered he didnt have any chips so had went to the shop to get some, they didnt have any so he had went to the chippy!
I called him a f*#@ing idiot in front of all the firemen and neighbours, who all struggled to keep their laughter in, me being a small guy, shouting abuse at a big guy, him just standing there sheepishly. Anyway, disaster averted, and everybody safe, it could have been much, much worse. We moved to a semi detatched house soon after, now we live beside a fireman, so we should be ok now.
The chip pan idiot even asked me later why I had chopped his door lock with an axe......... I resisted the temptation to knock him out and never spoke to him again.
