EARTHQUAKE

“You guys must both have been in earthquakes,” I said to my colleagues on Thursday. We were walking to the pub for a quick team lunch to celebrate my birthday.

“Oh yes, many!” said Junko. She went on to explain how buildings in Japan are built to withstand tremors but how it could still be quite scary.

Erica, who is from California, told us about how she’d been in quakes that had made the windows rattle and the ground sway from side-to-side. The longest was about 30 seconds, she said.

The sky was blue and English, the sun just carrying that faint warmth of Spring you get at this time of year. Bare trees were lit bright in the low sunshine, and birds were twittering over the fields at the edge of the village. We were about as far from a natural disaster as anyone could imagine.

“I’ve never been in one,” I said. “Although we do get them, but they’re extremely rare.”

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Later that day, I was doing a bit of research for a quiz, when I stumbled on a really interesting article about parts of the world where gravity is actually weaker, particularly around the Hudson Bay where glaciers are somehow connected to the anomaly. I instantly sent it to my friend, Andrea, who loves nerdy science stuff, is an architect, and also lives in Canada.

“The glacial bounce back phenomenon is also creating earthquakes in the Ottawa valley, despite it being in the middle of a tectonic plate!” she wrote.

We then had a great conversation about earthquakes. She has done all sorts of courses to figure out how to design buildings to withstand a one-in-2,500-year event, and her knowledge of quakes eclipsed the little wave-mechanics I’d done at university. Andrea said it was a difficult science because ‘the earth surprises us daily’.

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This afternoon, I was washing up. I was thinking about going for a walk. The neighbours were hammering something next door and I was cycling in my head through all the DIY jobs I can’t do because I’m hopeless with tools.

Suddenly, the windows rattled, there was a noise like an underground train and the house started swaying. It wasn’t anything dramatic - I actually thought it was next door, doing something with furniture. It lasted perhaps 6 seconds.

It’s on the BBC website now. 4.4 on the Richter Scale, somewhere in South Wales, but the ripples were felt all over England. You can read about it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43097113

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What’s going on then? Two conversations about earthquakes, including me saying: “I’ve never been in one” and then two days later, there’s little doubt that I’ve actually experienced it, albeit an ‘underwhelming one’ by all accounts.

Synchronicity? Am I in tune with the planet? Are these things prophetic? Is there something I should be aware of? Is God doing something? Or am I just in a quite unlikely set of coincidences? It’s made me wonder today.

It has made me wonder...

Do you ever think what it must be like to write a best-selling book about a time-travelling technical author, live in a big house, and drive a Ferrari. No? Oh no, me neither, me neither...