DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU DARLING? Well... yes actually. Last night it did. There was an earthquake of 5.3 on the richter scale, lasting 10 seconds before one AM. The epicentre was Market Rasen in Lincolnshire and the quake the largest in Britain for 25 years.
Here in Ely, we aren't so far from Lincolnshire and we felt it too - well me and and the cat did. My husband slept obliviously through it... although I didn't look at my watch so I'm still not sure if what I heard was the original earthquake, just before one am or the 1.8 aftershock at 4 am. Hmm... we'll never know.
Mr Cat sleeps in the room above us and I heard him galloping around the room followed by the sound of a massive bang as if he'd run straight into something and then more noise, as if whatever it was he had hit was shaking backwards and forwards. I asked my husband if he'd heard it and he told me to go back to sleep.
It was only when I woke up and thought harder about the noise - which I'd assumed to be Mr Cat hitting something upstairs head on - that I realised it sounded like the light by my bed rocking backwards and forwards.
Amusingly, it seems our experience almost exactly reflected events in most households at the time of the earthquake and that the event, itself, has highlighted an interesting difference between British women and their men as well as a natural phenomenon. All over the region young people, who were still up, were running out onto the street screaming. Meanwhile, older married couples, who'd been asleep in bed, were having this conversation.
Woman, waking up to hear a loud bang and hoping husband will go and investigate. "What the heck was that?"
Phlegmatic husband. "Nothing. Go back to sleep."
It was only the next morning, when people across the region woke up to find their TV ariels akimbo, their chimneys and gutters in the street or their ceilings on top of them and heard the event reported on the radio, that the loud bang heard by thousands of women and classified by their partners as "wife's neurotic fantasies" was reclassified "reality".
