A MAN who set fire to his own home was depressed after he heard a friend was dying from cancer, Worcester Crown Court heard.

Leslie Davies phoned the fire brigade from a public callbox and said he was trapped in a flat fire.

He then returned to his home in Springfield Avenue, Hereford, and set alight a sofa.

Firemen who entered the block of four flats found him sitting "transfixed" watching the fire in his living room, said Tim Sapwell, prosecuting.

The old sofa was capable of emitting lethal fumes within three minutes and the gases could have caused a flashback explosion.

But the fire was extinguished within a minute of it being started. Davies was taken to hospital before being arrested.

He confessed to starting the blaze and said that on his release from a jail term in December, last year, he had visited a 47-year-old woman and found out she was teminally ill.

Davies, aged 46, pleaded guilty to arson while reckless whether life was endangered. He was jailed for four years.

The blaze broke out around lunchtime on New Year's Day, when a couple were asleep in one of the upstairs flats.

Davies, an alcoholic, had risen at 7am, drank one-a-half-pints of beer and most of a bottle of vodka. He took his dog to a neighbour to save it from the fire.

He told police he couldn't believe his friend's fate and he just wanted to die himself. He had made no attempt to put out the fire.

Davies had a lengthy criminal record including four offences of causing damage.

Defence counsel Nicolas Cartwright said he was not suffering from a mental illness but the crime had a background of sadness.

"This was a cry for help rather than a determined attempt to take his own life," he said. "It arose out of his low mood. He was upset at the woman's illness."

Judge David Matthews accepted that Davies was "wrapped up in own melancholia" at the time.

Mr Cartwright said Davies's mother and brother had both died in 1998.

But he said the deliberate action had put the lives of firefighters and other flat dwellers at risk.