There's nothing like hearing someone say, "Hello, can I have the fire service please", to wake you up with a jolt in the morning. It was H and I jumped up out of bed as fast as I could. My first thought was that it was our house that was on fire but then I heard H telling the fire people that it was a car behind our house. I looked out of the curtains and saw this car well ablaze but with no one else around, it was a scary sight. There were pops and whizzes as if someone had set off a load of fireworks or if there had been fireworks in the car but while H expected to see some pesky kids outside the window when he first looked, apparently those noises are causes by all the bits of the car; bulbs, plastic, glass and circuit boards exploding (I think they are all car parts that would make fireworky noises but there's nothing surer than that I'll be laughed at later if I'm wrong).

Being a person who is, perhaps, unhealthily transfixed by fire, I started watching it: it was a scary sight. Then H told me to move away in case the fuel tank caught fire, in which case the situation could become quite dangerous. After a few minutes I went back and the fuel had caught fire and the fire had changed from being relatively controlled to very aggressive and huge black clouds of smoke were bellowing up and the car parked next to it had also caught fire.

Luckily, just then the Fire Brigade arrived. It took them a while to put it out as the fuel kept reigniting itself as the car was so hot. H is all knowledgeable about car fires (and putting them out) from his days marshalling at race tracks. I don't think he ever had to put any out, although I could be wrong. Apparently, you have to use powder to put out the fuel and water to cool the area down but you have to be careful as obviously you don't want fuely-water everywhere.

The first car was totally gutted and was just reduced to a shell and the second car was just burned on one side. I saw the owners of the second car open the boot and retrieve some things from it but both cars are a right-off. H thinks it could've been arson as why would a car set itself alight at 6/6.30am? But I don't like to think of bad things like that. I guess we'll never know. The cars have been removed now and all that's there to remind us of what happened this morning are large black burnt areas on the tarmac.

The fire scared me quite a bit and has made me think that my playing obsessively with candles has been getting quite out of hand. Also I had a nightmare about it.

When I jumped out of bed at seven am I'd already been having horrendous sweats all night long and these continued when I went back to sleep (thinking that it was the erm...best thing to do and that I'd be my normal lazy self and wouldn't make the most of my early start.) So I went back to sleep for a few hundred more hours. I think it's because you're so hot that having night sweats means that I also have crazy, crazy film-like dreams. Mad ones like chasing pink mice (and also Noodle at one point) but while I'm pretending to try and catch them, I'm also trying to let them go as I know that bad things with happen to them if they're trapped. Of course, a few people from school turn up, one who had a baby with a super-tall model and some other people get killed as part of a real-life computer game which you can't escape from. And, last but not least, the fire. After the firemen had put it out it somehow managed to reignite itself and spread to the flats and to our houses. Our roof had gone and so had most of my stuff, except a few clothes that I given away ages ago?? The room wasn't black and burned though, it was just empty except for a few things that had survived but then more things started to appear alhough I couldn't remember the things that were gone which was upsetting for me. Are there any dream specialists out there who want to try and analyse this stuff?

Finally, when I arose from my slumber, I felt as if I'd been in a cinema all morning and so set about doing some of the things on my list. I didn't put the radio on - think I'm going to have to ration Five Live from now on as it's taking over my life - and finally finished those god damn Friends of the Earth minutes. Hurrah for the clocks going back, I say, without it I would have achieved even less today that I'm on-target for, which could be a record even for me. Never mind the fact that I'll be depressed for the next six months due to the dark evenings but then that's another example of my usual short-sightedness.