That Manchester tale reminds me of a similar near miss: I lived in Taiwan in 97-99 in a big commune house above a western goods shop called The Box Store because of all the boxes of American and European foodstuffs. The place always had people coming and going, was one of the hubs for Westerners in Kaohsiung, frequented by all sorts of colourful and dastardly characters from gold and drug smugglers to addicts to hippies to those running away to find themselves; I suppose I was one of the latter. Happy days mostly, I had a cheap but huge room with a rented computer where I'd discovered the internet, I worked a little but drank and smoked loads, I played pinball every day in a local arcade above a supermarket, learned a little Chinese, had a crazy girlfriend, and taught myself to ride my first bike, a 2 stroke Yamaha 125 that burned as much oil as it did petrol. No bike helmets back in those days so we all rode about drunk after buying pills from the Russian sailors who came to the port looking for poontang.
Anyway after 18 months I'd saved enough for my plan to slowly travel home overland over the next year or so, so I sold my bike for the $25 I'd paid for it to the next guy, collected my savings and left for the airport to Phnom Penh. The next three months was spent happily travelling lazily through Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, and I'd just spent a fantastic week travelling by small boat upriver without any electricity or other English speakers, when I arrived exhausted in northern Laos, ready to collect my visa for overland travel into China. I logged into my hotmail account in an Internet cafe in Vientiane to find two horrible scary emails on a day I'll never forget - one was telling me to come straight home as my mum was dying, the other one was from my old friends in the Box Store to tell me that a few hours after I'd left, some crazy pyromaniac just released from jail had set fire to the house that night, in the stairwell. Most of my friends escaped by leaping over the fire down the staircase or climbing onto the roof on the outside of the building, but two never made it out, and were killed from smoke inhalation. They later caught the arsonist who had been outside watching the flames consume the building with a rapt and distant look on his face. If I'd still been in my room, I was a goner too, as the location (next door to Donna and Carlos) was too far from any escape routes in this warren of an old wooden building. I dodged a bullet that night. RIP Donna and Carlos, both in their 20s.
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