A 35-YEAR-OLD man has been jailed for starting a fire in his room at a homeless hostel in Dunfermline.

Staff extinguished the blaze as David Lorimer sat on his bed watching, just after six o’clock in the morning.

Bizarrely, he told them he had set fire to his curtains because he was fed up with the alarm going off repeatedly.

David Lorimer, currently a prisoner at Perth, appeared at Dunfermline Sheriff Court.

He admitted that on May 5, at the James Bank Hostel, James Street, he wilfully set fire to curtains whereby the fire took hold.

Depute fiscal Alex Kirk said there had been problems with the fire alarm going off repeatedly because of a fault.

At 6.05am, the alarm again went off but this time it was a real fire. A support worker and another person ran to the room and used a master key to get in.

“When they entered accused’s room the curtains were ablaze. They put out the fire. The accused was on his bed rocking back and forward,” added the depute.

When asked why he’d started the fire, he answered: “To stop the fire alarm going off.”

Defence solicitor Peter Robertson said: “He was getting very frustrated because the fire alarm was always going off. In protest he set fire to the curtains. It was clearly very confused behaviour.”

Sheriff Craig McSherry jailed Lorimer for 16 months.