Did the earth move for you?

After a jolly day trip to Edinburgh on Monday, we were heading home on the train when Twitter delivered me some devastating news...

Still full of excessive amounts of coffee, pizza, and reeling from the sensory overload of a large lingerie department visit, my journey back to the deep south of Cumbria should have been one of calm, tranquillity, listening to the Doctor Who theme song and surreptitiously studying other passengers then pretending I was enjoying the view when they looked up.

Of course, a trip to a large city meant a heady day of unprecedented mobile phone signal strength, making the choice between looking at the delights of beautiful Edinburgh, and discovering that my phone could actually load a video, all the more tricky.

As the miles slipped by in a blur of lights and a faint whiff of train toilet, the selection of letters and symbols indicating signal strength gradually lessened, until I was once again faced with the bleak message “Unable to update Twitter at this time – no signal”.

Scrolling back through my timeline, I was stunned to read a brief automated tweet, bringing terrifying news: There had been an earthquake in Silverdale! Trembling (but that could have been the coffee), I tried to check the BBC News website, but still no signal.

The information was minimal. It had struck at tea time, at a depth of 8km, with a magnitude of 1.1 on the Richter scale. I feared the worst – in my little picturesque village just along the coast, surely there must have been colossal damage?

Buildings collapsed? People crawling from the wreckage? Maybe it had triggered a terrifying tsunami, sweeping sheep inland and piling them against the doors of the pub? Maybe I couldn’t get a phone signal because the local infrastructure had been wiped out, forcing the network to shut down further afield! My God! My Sheena Easton 7” singles collection might have been destroyed!

I tried to distract myself by listening to music on shuffle and flicking through the copy of The Big Issue I’d purchased, but it was no good. The suspenders were killing me. Suspense! I definitely meant suspense.

Arriving back at Oxenholme (it’s the gateway to the Lake District, apparently), we rushed to the car and headed home nervously. The roads were rough, with huge splits and holes threatening to swallow the car whole, but that’s normal for Cumbria.

Amazingly, not only had our village survived, our house was still standing too. Inside, the mess was terrible – I really should have tidied up before we went out.

There was no mention of it on the 10pm news on the TV, and I couldn’t find anything on the internet the next day either, so I’ve concluded that the government must be covering it all up.

Further research revealed that a quake of that magnitude is equivalent to about 30lbs of TNT going off, or a construction site blast... 8kms underground.

I bet The Wombles are really annoyed.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 27th of February 2015. You can view the version published on the paper's website here

It was a lovely day out in Edinburgh. Here's the proof:

See? Top notch proper cappuccino and... er... y'know.

I should probably keep a count of the number of times I've got Sheena in the paper...

(Odd - the cassette deck seems to playing OK again at the moment. and is giving forth - via a TDK D90 - Duran Duran's "Greatest" from a cassette recorded on the 2nd of January 2000. Yes, I am a nerd about these things. Get over it. *complicated hand gesture*)

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