This morning I drove into work past a fire.

As I approached, I could see a billowing plume of dark grey smoke and thought at first that the lorry coming toward me had a serious problem – but as I came closer, I could see that the smoke was emanating from a ground floor front window of one of the houses just the other side of the junction.

Clearly a fire.

The next thing I noticed was that, as might be expected, there were a lot of bystanders hanging around, watching. The lights changed as I got to them so I had leisure to assess whether anyone was actually on a call. One person was but it wasn’t obvious from her face what the call was about. Everyone else who had their phone out was filming.
Filming this house, this home, burning. I know they say you shouldn’t go into a burning building but there wasn’t even anyone within shouting distance, trying to ascertain whether there were people inside, maybe sleeping people who needed to be woken up.

Just before the lights changed, flames starting licking out of the window, up the front of the house.

Nothing. Still filming. I realized that my assessment had concluded that I couldn’t be sure whether anyone had called the emergency services. I actually didn’t have enough faith that they wouldn’t all have assumed someone else had done it and just kept recording their video for social media.

It wasn’t safe for me to make a call at the lights, obviously, so I drove just a little further to the next side road and turned down it to pull over. A motorcyclist had turned in front of me and halted just round the corner, stopping me from getting round. I thought he might have had the same idea as me; I pulled alongside him, lowered my window and asked if he had stopped to call 999. He had. He also couldn’t be sure that someone else had taken care of it.

Better safe than sorry.

I carried on down the road to turn around and as I did so, we heard the sirens blaring. By the time I reached the end of the road again, there was a fire engine blasting past it.

So someone had called, and I was grateful but also disturbed. I was probably upset in equal measure about the possibility of harm coming to anyone in the house and the casual crowd standing around capturing the event for a few extra likes.

A little way along and I was surprised to find that my face was trying to cry. Not ideal when driving so I put a lid on it but the unexpectedness of it made that harder. I’m possibly wound a little more tightly than usual right now but it just made me so sad to think of those sheeple, intensely focused on entirely the wrong thing; I’m still thinking about the possible people inside the house and worrying about them, too. I hope others were as well but, as with making the phone call, I am no longer sure.

I think what I’m trying to say, if I’m trying to say anything, is we need to pay more attention, in the right way, to what’s going on around us. Unplug a bit. Think people first.

Make it so no-one ever has to doubt again whether someone in a crowd 25 strong has called the emergency services.