The other night I suddenly woke up with a strange sensation in my arm and the need to move and stretch it continuously. I have since found a name for it on Internet but I refuse to believe that I have a syndrome.

Anyway, while awake, tossing and turning, generally feeling like at 2am my night has finished, I decided to move to the spare room to let my hard working husband sleep. As I was drawing the curtains in the spare room a strange glow on the horizon caught my attention. That’s a weird sunrise, I thought. Then I looked at the clock again. 2am is not the time for British autumnal sunrise. Then I spotted the smoke.

Against the background of the beautiful starry sky the rolling cloud of smoke looked really ominous. It reminded me of bush fire that I’ve seen countless times in Africa.

I had a very short chat with my husband (that much for leaving him to sleep) about the estimated location of the fire. I was worried that being the middle of the night, I might be the only one seeing it (there are mostly fields and a few cottages around us) and if it’s someone’s house…

I threw on my dressing gown, slippers, grabbed my phone and jumped into the car. I drove to the top of the farm drive, which is higher up than our house and offers a better view the the fire’s direction.

Straw bales. Luckily it wasn’t a house that was on fire. And to my relief I spotted some flash lights around the field, meaning that someone else knew. I suddenly realised how much pressure I felt when I thought that I was the only one awake. Thank goodness for the other night owls. In fact, it was my brother-in-law, who saw the flames from his window and called the fire brigade. They all jumped out of their beds and arrived within fifteen minutes.

But I keep thinking about all the work that went into creating of those 250 bales of straw. What a waste, what a damage. Sometimes you can spend all year working towards the harvest and anything from weather and pests to careless or vicious person can make all your work go ‘up in smoke’.