Fire on the prairie! (well, Station Road West actually)

It turned out that the fire engines in Croydon were not the last we were to see yesterday. At about half past 10, we decided to grab a spot of supper at the Oxted Inn, little did we know that they stop serving at 10. What an outrage, lol. We were just walking down to the bank on Station Road West, past the clothes shop 'Personality', when James noticed smoke rising off one of the shoes in the window! They had placed the said item right on top of one of those large high wattage spotlights that always get left on after closing time. It had obviously been just too much for the shoe to handle, and it looked to us as though the thing was ready to catch properly alight. We were a little hesitant about phoning up 999 at first, as it wasn't as if it was a huge blaze or anything.. James kept saying.. "well, it's not actually an emergency", lol. But sure enough, in about 5 minutes, up turned two whole fire engines, and about 15 firemen! We wondered if they were going to have to bash the door down or something so get in, but it seems they have a special high-tech bit of kit for this very purpose! A pole. Through the letter box it went.. and there started a kind of fishing game. It look them about 20 minutes to hook the pole under the shoe, and knock it to safety. It was quite interesting to watch! One thing I did find surprising though, was that they didn't have an emergency contact number for the owner of the shop. I would have thought it might be a good idea for the emergency services to have access to that kind of information, especially if this kind of thing happens quite often! But as it was, they were looking around all of the neighbouring shop fronts for out of hours contact numbers -not ideal really!