Paging Mr Heston! Paging Mr Heston!
As I said to the audience at last night's Banter recording in Central London, "Thank God you're here!" After all, we had all survived an earthquake. I expected the dailies to be rather more circumspect about this ten-second tremor at 1am yesterday morning. They're not, but they would have been hard-pushed to top the way it was reported yesterday in London, when the wreckage and masonry still lay all about. The Evening Standard, which is published three times in a day, pulled out all the hyperbolic stops. EARTHQUAKE HITS LONDON, it bawled, arrogantly trying to claim for the capital a geological event which actually happened in Lincolnshire! (The "West End Final" edition of the paper had upgraded it to EARTHQUAKE ROCKS LONDON. Fuck! Run!) It used the same agency photographs that were used around the world (none of them taken in London): a hole in a roof in Barnsley where a chimney pot had fallen through (I saw this on the front page of, I think, the Mail today); a woman in her dressing gown ("surveying the damage", which mainly involved her standing on her own undamaged doorstep); some more chimney pots; and, er, that's it. The Sun managed to find a couple who were willing to lie about having had sexual intercourse during the ten-second quake - not something you'd brag about, really - so that they could use a headline along the lines of "The Earth Moved For Us", ha ha.
Not having listened to the radio yesterday morning or seen the news on the internet, I was oblivious to the destruction that had been wrought across Britain. I walked into the London Underground, my curiosity piqued by the Standard's sensational coverage, and found that on the electronic update screens every single Tube line was advertising "good service". An earthquake had hit London and not a single Tube line was showing "minor delays"? What kind of rubbish earthquake was this? Had we called in Charlton Heston and George Kennedy for nothing?
I went to the BBC News website and, as usual, they were lazily asking us to write the news, calling for "eyewitness accounts" of the devastating effects of the 'quake. Here are three - all genuine:
"Our dogs were barking and our cockatoo was agitated."
"It lasted 10 seconds but felt much longer."
"My first thought was that it was an intruder; my second thought was that it was a poltergeist."
I expect a UN appeal has been launched, and food parcels (including cockatoo feed) are on their way. It's our Katrina. It really is.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 9:21 AM
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13 Comments:
I just realised, I DID experience it. I was up late cruising the internet and thought I heard hard drops of rain on the window. Then I realised it wasn't that but could only think that it might be a cat tapping on the pane. It gave me a small fright, cos I am scared of cats, so I couldn't open the front door to check. I'm in North Shropshire. Can you see the headlines "NORTH SHROPSHIRE PLAGUED BY CAT-WINDOW TAPPING QUAKE FEAR"? Better email it to the Beeb just in case.
Funnily enough, post-rationalising, the sparrows that live in our eaves were tweeting at around 1am, so I expect they felt it. I didn't.
All a bit odd really. In deepest darkest east anglia I was awake and actually found it quite alarming. In many ways I've been bemused by many people's lack of interest in it - it was an earthquake - albeit a reserved British one.
The real problem was (as ever) with the rolling news folks who had no real pictures to speak of, or any decent testimonies to the event because other than it occuring nothing much else happened :
"So what happened ?"
"The room shook a bit."
Repeat to fade.
Mr Simon James x
I experienced it here in Luton. I woke up at 1am after what I thought was my neighbours children knocking their bed against the party wall.
It wasn't until my husband mentioned the earthquake in the morning that I realised that must have been what it was. It all sort of made sense as I did feel movement as I woke and that couldn't have been the children next door.
That lad in South Yorkshire with the broken pelvis certainly felt it! Having experienced one in the US, it is a very uncanny feeling when the ground actually moves. Plays nasty tricks with your sense of balance. And there's not a lot you can do.
Andrew,
I've dropped in a few times and I love your blog. Perhaps "love" is too strong a word from a 40-year-old happily cohabiting mother of two but there you go!
I was still awake after watching a double bill of Shameless but thought a quake with Dudley (obligatory pronunciation is apparently "Dudd-l-eye") as its epicentre in 2002 was bigger.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my comments about Sweeney Todd a couple of weeks back.
Sorry to ramble on but thank you again for providing this 'ere quality read!
I felt it a lot here in Rusholme. I thought someone had nuked Salford.
My wife and I laughed at the BBC's coverage which showed the quake extending down as far as London but curiously no farther North than Hull (apparently it was felt in Aberdeen).
We were fully expecting the headline to be "Earthquake in Lincoln,no Londoners hurt".
More 'observations on birds' reactions to earthquake': I woke up suddenly to what sounded like hail rattling against the sash windows and pheasants calling loudly in the garden.(I see someone else referred to pheasants 'singing' on the BBC website). Perhaps it was morphic resonance?
We are in Cheshire, by the way, so I wasn't imagining it.
My favorite statement was on the BBC news last night. A girl said:
"The curtains wobbled an' that."
Shocking.
Sky News really did their best to round up a couple of 'survivors'. They were showing a piece with about 8 or 9 people commenting on their lucky escape - all tame stuff really until one idiot said 'my first thought was that it was Al Qaeda'. As if Osama Bin Laden had sat in his cave with an up to date Ordnance Survey map and decided "well fcuk this for a game of soldiers I've had enough, let's blow Market Rasen off the planet". Some people (etc etc)
Tuned in to Sky News to find the poor overnight talent, obviously inexperienced in the matters of reporting such exciting stories at that time of the morning, asking viewers to send in their videos of the earthquake.
I was tempted to record a short clip of me holding my mobile still, then shaking it and going 'bloody hell what was that?', but resisted.
PS: Enjoyed the recording last night, wonder if half of the things will make the final cut :)
Glad you enjoyed it Alex - one of the maddest Banters yet.
If you want more earthquake fun, try the videos sent in by users of the BBC News website (they're on the right hand side). If ever amateur footage showed what a non-event this earthquake really was, it's these!
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