a few months ago
Not long after having had to go bankrupt, discovering I had a long term illness, and various other fun problems, my family and I had to move in a hurry.

We hadn't managed to find a place to live after needing to move out of our last rent, and a nice lady from church offered to put us up for a few weeks while we carried on looking. A nice lady called Anne we didn't really know that well. It was a lovely big old farmhouse, and she and her husband had spent the last 12 years making it as lovely as it was. Apparently it'd been a shell when they moved in, pretty much.

Two days in, she sees my wife putting some clothes a bit too close to the aga to dry, and she made joke that we didn't want to do that, or we might burn the house down, and the "we'd all be homeless!" much jollity.

Only the next day, we popped back to the house about lunchtime, and there was smoke coming up from in between the floorboards. We were just wondering what on earth could be casuing this, and decided to 'phone Anne at work to ask if there was some underfloor heating that may have gone wrong...

The 'phone didn't work at all, and we wandered around for a bit before realising there was another 'phone upstairs. I went to go upstairs, but there was quite a lot of smoke up there. In fact, even with my jumper over my face, I couldn't get further than the 3rd step up. The smoke downstairs was obviously being forced down the wall cavities, and up through the floorboards, there was som much of it.

At this point, I realised it might be serious, and we ran over to the nearest neighbours to call 999.

We hadn't been able to contact Anne, and we were in a total panic, wondering what we'd done to somehow cause the fire. We decided that if it was indeed our fault, we'd never set foot in Cornwall again.

We hadn't found out the cause of the fire when Anne pulled up to see her house surrounded by 3 fire engines, lots of smoke and loads of firemen. Given that we'd been there 3 days compared to her 12 years, I'm sure Anne thought we'd done something wrong too, but she was amazingly not rude to us about it.

Thankfully it turned out that it was an electrical fault in her bedroom. A badly wired socket had shorted and set fire to the curtains. And apparently if we'd not turned up when we did, no-one would have seen the fire until too late, when the whole house would have had to have been pulled down.

Oh, and the room we were wandering around in was directly below the fire, and the ceiling was about to collapse.

Just to top it off, a couple of months later, when were in our own house, we had a big flood, due to a burst pressure tank that had rusted through.

My prayers over those few months were very sweary.



"Oooh, that was long" said the worship leader to the preacher.
(teasus likes tea, Thu 3 Nov 2005, 17:46, Reply)