Like any good story, just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse, they do.

My scorched and tarnished lungs have been branded by the Lima air with its hot and searing fire, and the thought of enduring another two weeks this way is enough to send me running for a fire extinguisher or, failing that, a tactical nuclear weapon.

So imagine my delight when a little after noon this afternoon my girlfriend interrupted me working on my novel with the announcement that the building next door was on fire and we should really consider making plans to leave the building on rather short order and on a potentially permanent basis.

Our room was perched on top of the third-floor roof, and stepping out into the air one immediately noticed that the visibility dropped to slightly less than a foot, as a massive onrushing cloud of hot white smoke rushed passed me out onto the street below.

The building next door was, it appeared, on fire.

Sirens had been howling for half an hour but I brushed off the annoyance as you do a couple of flies at a picnic: they must not interfere with the activity at hand. But the building next door was most conclusively and spectacularly on fire, and something would need to be done, and really, rather soon.

If you’re going to get burned to death it’s important to make sure your fried corpse is properly dressed so that the medical examiner has something to brighten his day. So I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out a large yellow bandanna and tied it around my face, cowboy train robber style.

Properly attired I began to move more quickly. Laptop: off: in bag. Passport hidden here: other passport hidden there: money: here: there: can’t remember, time to go: grab a hat (hey, fashion calls) and off we went, the girlfriend and I, down two flights of stairs, through the fluffy oxygen-free clouds a light breeze wafted our way.

Out into the street, and from the park across the way we sat and watched Hiroshima. Huge billows of smoke poured from behind our building, the rainbow of fruit flavours flushing through white to black to grey and back to white again. I held the train robber fashion accessory close to my mouth and fought back a sneeze; I failed, and to the grim amusement of the twenty-odd people gathered in traditional Peruvian style to watch their neighbour’s house burn down, began to sneeze in long, uninterrupted, uninterruptible streams, as airborne snot shot from every facial orifice there was (well, two).

An hour went by. More or less. The smoke got bigger, the smoke got smaller. Finally it got smaller. The cats we rescued from the house stopped mewing their heads off. As the smoke got thinner big chunks of flying soot floated up into the air and scattered their joy throughout the neighbourhood. A cop on a motorbike sirened by, checking out the nearby houses for signs of the fire spreading. It didn’t. We decided to move back in.

The house smelled like a salami warehouse. Even the paint had that smoky flavour, and I don’t even normally lick (or eat) paint. So I sat outside in the tiny front garden with the laptop on my lap until moist white bits of ash started to flavour the keyboard, smearing their yummy goodness all over that finger-based input device.

Turns out the building that burned was a warehouse. Later news brought word that it was in fact a security warehouse. What the heck did that mean? A “security warehouse”? Apparently it houses — or should I say, “housed” — the offices of a security company that takes care of warehouses.

Looks like they could use a little practice.