Quake

The house shook at 7.24 this morning. I worried. Surely it must be Laurence coming home from work, what could have happened that he arrived back at half past seven when he was due in at four? Naturally I also have the belief in there somewhere that had I been lying awake worrying about my fully grown son instead of sleeping, I could have in some way influenced the outcome.
Then I heard the neighbours, maybe it had been their door.
Kevin read my thoughts.
'Probably a 'quake,' he muttered, 'I'll look it up later.'

A 'quake. We do get minor tremors from time to time. There are a couple of places in town, a branch of Future Shop, some government offices, both on the first floor rather than the ground, where you can feel the floor tremble sometimes.

The buildings, bridges and structures here are all built to withstand earthquakes. Not the tiny tremors we get used to, the ones that rattle the cups or make the ground tremble sightly, almost imperceptibly, but just in case we get something bigger. Most houses are timber framed, they probably would be anyway because we have so much wood here and not so much of the wherewithal to make bricks, but timber-framed houses are safer in case of 'quake. There are 300 tremors a year in the area, so a little under one a day.

I think I found this scarier from afar, when Kevin would talk about them. Now, I take it as a matter of course, and feel reassured by the awareness and planning of Civil Engineers and Architects. Householders know what to do in case of a large enough quake to actually have an impact on built structures.

Since we were awake early and the sun was shining through the blinds and keeping us awake, I went down and made the coffee. Kevin was surfing the net. He had discovered that the Millennium Falcon is still the number one favourite space ship in a survey conducted by some sci-fi website. The Tardis was in there somewhere as was the more recent Enterprise. But the number two ship was Serenity. I think this may say more about the people who voted than anything else.

Who didn't love the Millennium Falcon? Austen had one. Perhaps it was partly because of the swashbuckling style of Han Solo and Chewbacca, perhaps it was the importance of the ship to Han Solo, or the fact that he had won it from Lando Calrissian. The ship had a history, it was a spaceship in the true ship sense of the word. A pirate ship, like The Black Pearl. And of course, in the end, helped to save the day when Luke Skywalker and R2D2 came aboard.

By strange coincidence, just skimming the headlines in the Guardian, I see that people in Kent in the UK experienced a 4.3 quake yesterday. We on the other hand, can find no evidence of one strong enough to shake the house. Must have been the neighbours then.

But how connected we all are.