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 ...

Unstable Stables: Throw away the key

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple...

Is it foggy? No.

When I get put in charge (which is bound to happen soon), I'm going to introduce a whole raft of new laws, for I shall be a just and fair ruler. I'm quite liking the title of 'Most Marvellous Emperor Of Sensible Regulations And Bountiful Lovingness Not To Mention Exceedingly Handsome', but it might be a bit long. On that basis, I'll settle for the more informal 'He Who Is Smashing' from my loyal subjects. Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes - had you noticed? Here, then, is the first law that will introduced: grumpyf1 law No.1 - Turn your fog lights off, you complete git. Don't get me wrong; If it genuinely is foggy, fog lights are quite handy. The reason for introduction of this law is because 96% of the time (based on my own in-depth research) it isn't foggy when some utter cockwomble blinds you. This has always been a bit of a problem but in the last couple of years it seems to have escalated out of control, possibly because of the...

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