Shaken and stirred

Well played...

Its been a few years since that Scottish guy was heard on YouTube shouting “Oh my God! Trampoline! Trampoline!” as his neighbour’s one sailed dramatically past his window in a gale.

Since them we’ve dealt stoically with flooding, we’ve endured snow and ice like the troopers we are, and we’ve generally put on a brave face, gritted our teeth, and just jolly well got on with it as much as possible, regardless of what nature has thrown at us.

Until Saturday. Saturday was a game changer. The day that will be remembered for possibly a short while as Quake Day, when unprecedented levels of almost no damage whatsoever rippled forth from deep under somewhere north-north east of Swansea.

This shocking once-in-a-decade seismic event clocked in with a social media-inflaming 4.4 magnitude, with the effects felt as far as the southern edge of the Lake District, where it was easily mistaken for several excited lambs landing simultaneously after some particularly exuberant frolicking.

Through large parts of Wales, the Midlands and South West, the anguished cries of people from London who were gravely affected by it not happening to them so they could be smug about it were heard, long after the mild tremors had subsided.

So alarming was the largest seismic event in mainland Britain since 2008 (mag 5.2 in Lincolnshire, lest we forget) that Port Talbot vs Taff’s Well’s football match had to be temporarily stopped.

It’s expected to take several months for everyone to stop banging on about it. Did the earth move for you..?

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 23rd of February 2018, where the title was augmented with "Quake left us..." at the front.

The piece included a seemingly random picture of sandbags outside Millom Community Hospital... presumably because I mentioned flooding. Tenuous? Hell, yeah.

Didn't feel a thing. It's SOOOOO unfair.

(CD A-Z: Jeff Wayne's Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds - The New Generation. Spoiler alert! It's not as good as the original...)

Comments

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

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 ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog