WHEN I peeped behind the curtains it was filthy out there. A howling 47C wind, brown with dust blowing straight down from the deserts.

But if I couldn't detect smoke it was OK. I could pull the curtain closed and lie down on the concrete floor and turn the video back on and try to forget the tension of this horrible weather.

It'll probably be all right. Odds are it'll be all right. There is no actual reason for a fire to start, is there? Not all by itself just because it's hot, even this hot.

But somewhere, of course, it always does.

We heard of one about 25km to the east of us. It must have started in the scrub on the edge of suburbia and got straight among the houses but we were only hearing about it, we couldn't even smell it.

Even when the change came we never smelled any smoke anywhere. So we just heard about it.

Someone rang someone who said the fire was as far in as that big pokie venue and that big fabric warehouse had gone and that fuel station had been burnt.

Wow, we thought, now that would be something to see. A whole petrol station.

But it was all bulldust. Why aren't people more careful with facts?

Last night I went in there and bought some fuel and said to the bloke "Hey, this place burned down didn't it?" and he said he'd heard that too. A lot. Everybody had heard that.

But a lot of houses did burn, including a friend's. She had tiled her own floors with broken white tiles in a crazy-pattern with black grout and it looked great and I'd copied the idea at my house.

Now there's just grey tin and a couple of chimneys and I wonder about those tiles under all the ash.

The house next door had too many old cars parked around it and I think she wished they weren't there really and maybe now they've gone along with everything else, but I didn't notice driving by.

I did see two smouldering ruins on each side of an unscathed house and they were watching telly on their big flat-screen.

The next day I was working near Kilmore. There's people parked on the roadside looking at the smudge of smoke on the hills to the east.

I suppose that's the fire that went through to Kinglake. It must have moved fast as a train from hell, a solid continuum of smoke and ash and flame and roar like being on some volcanic planet, another world.

I wonder if they ever really understood what that screaming wind could do when the very air itself became fire.