Earthquake: David Charters takes a whimsical look at Britons enjoying a crisis

Feb 28 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

On the day the nation was gripped by an earthquake, David Charters takes a whimsical look at Britons enjoying a crisis

BY JOVE, what fun we all had! A wee flutter under the land’s crust, some-where near Lincoln, hitherto famed only for the shade of green favoured by Robin Hood, and we’re all a-quiver with stories – how the urn with Uncle Claude’s ashes top- pled off the mantel-piece, the budgie trilled Abide with Me and Aunty Gwladys felt a strange twinge in her replacement hip, as she hobbled home from the Frog and Trout in the early hours, humming We Shall Not Be Moved.

At the queues to the railway station ticket kiosks, where total strangers, still mesmerised by the earlier events, bumped into each other. “Did the Earth move for you?” the surgical boot salesman asked the curate’s wife.

One of my colleagues breezed into the office, clutching a cardboard beaker of frothy coffee. “Did you feel it?” she asked, cheeks glowing with excitement.

“Our whole house shook,” said a senior chap, who drives in from Lancashire, “never known anything like it.”

“I slept right through it,” said another, his features motionless. Everyone looked at him in disbelief. “How could you have done?”

Now you will have to imagine me sitting in the bedroom in a house on the Birkenhead fault line. The alarm clock has just beeped and the sharp tip on my wife’s elbow has just been guided to a tender spot in my rib-cage, as if by radar.

“Ouch” was my greeting to the new day. “How could you have slept through that?” asked my wife. “I awoke to find the whole bed trembling. At first I thought it was you. ‘Was it Armageddon or David’s snoring?’, I asked myself. But, of course, you were dead to the world. No vital signs at all, apart from a slight twitch in your nose.”

“Gosh, I must have missed one of the great events in our recent history,” I said.

Indeed, it was. We were a community again. Everyone was talking about the same thing. We were discussing the Richter Scale with the expertise normally dedicated to the snuffles or diarrhoea.

The old British spirit was revived. Linda McDermott, cool as you like, presented her Radio Merseyside show, as the studio shook.

People in areas where the tremors were at their strongest were truly alarmed.

But most of us quickly settled into that phlegmatic British mood of calm in a crisis.

February 27, 2008, will be remembered for the Great British Earthquake, when nobody was really hurt, but everyone, except those deep sleepers and snorers, were left with something to remember.