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*)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog