Newcastle is California

[desperance]

Ah, if only...

There's actually a line in a pamphlet (1651, if I remember) that says "Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru". Since when the line has been adopted and adapted more than once; Newcastle is apparently Lesbos, and also Fire Island, and elsewhere.

But last night, yay. Earthquake! This must be California!

I was in bed, like a good tired novelist ought to be; and wide awake and listening to the radio, as this particular tired novelist usually is. And the bed shook. For seconds at a time, and in a way that it never has shooken before. Enough, at any rate, for me to say "Okay, what just happened?" and have 'earthquake' on the list of possibles. Probably not favourite - 'subsidence' was also there, and the house has slumped before, its back wall positively bulges - but definitely there.

Unhappily, I cannot report how the cats reacted, as neither of them was with me at the time. And it wasn't - quite - dramatic or scary enough to get me out of bed.

*is phlegmatic*

(Why are you laughing?)

Still. Earthquake! Never had one of those before. One of my favourite young people was conceived in an earthquake - cue all necessary earth-moving jokes, to taste - but I wasn't myself there at the time. Now I was. It's a thing to tick off my life-list...

Comments

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

While I believe I was awake at the time, I felt nothing 14 miles north of the Great Divide. Maybe I was just fuzzy, or maybe I always walk that way.

I have been in an earthquake before, when I lived in Manxland. Can't say I'm in a hurry to repeat the experience.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

So where were you in 1984? Clearly on the wrong coast of the UK. My three cats all ignored it, including Horus, who is a wimp and scared of everything (the ironing board, random shoes, the marquis' blue anorak, the cat food tin...)
I do know that feeling of excitement, though. A typhoon hit Tokyo while we were there last summer. I was delighted: no-one was hurt, it was fascinating to experience and I'd always wanted to be in one.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I am desperate for a typhoon. I keep hoping to get back to Taiwan in typhoon season, tho' even then of course it's pot luck whether the timing's right...

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

shewhomust and I slept through this one, but we did have our earth-tremor moment a few years back in a B&B above a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. (I thing that was the one centred on Dudley.) Up in the eaves of the house, the door rattled and might have opened; if I believed in them I might have thought it was a ghost.

shewhomust's cousin Sally and husband Graham live about 20 miles west of the epicentre.

[kythiaranos.livejournal.com]

I'm so jealous! I only ever agreed to move to California back in the day because I hoped to experience an earthquake, and then I never did.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I have slept through all my earthquakes.

Life is sad.

[jemck.livejournal.com]

The entire household slept through whatever was felt hereabouts in Oxon. Much to the disgust of the sons when they heard the news on the radio this morning.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Probably a two, or three at most. Fours can make you mildly seasick, anything above a six (if close by) can throw you out of bed--or throw things on top of you.

(experienced too many to count. Hate them all.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Five-point-something at the epicentre - but that was a long way from here. I was surprised it reached us at all. My agent was close enough to hear it, but seems remarkably unruffled.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

A five pointer has a pretty good range, though it depends on the substructure.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

I tuned out earthquakes the first year I lived in Japan. I would notice the house rattling, but I never thought "earthquake", and just figured it was the wind or something. It took a friend pointing it out to me to realize what I felt.

Yeah, and I'm very perceptive geologist.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

now you've solved that 'write what you know' problem.

but - earthquakes --> Newcastle?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Actually earthquake --> Market Rasen (Lincolnshire), but it just caught the country's funny-bone, so everybody seems to have felt it, from the south coast up to Scotland.

Mostly they happen further south or further west, and never get this far. I am adolescently chuffed.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I think of Britain as being so, um, stable - not like it's on the rim of fire! Are you guys waiting for a Big One some time in the geological future?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Not noticeably. There is no major plate-tectonic type of fault below us, just a webwork of minor faults. All very British and restrained. Though it is also true that those earthquakes we do get (and we do) are often not conspicuously associated with any of those faults.

Happily, our tremors are equally British and restrained. This one was 5.2, and the only reported casualty was a young man in an attic bedroom, whose pelvis was broken by a chimney crashing through the roof. Ouchie, but individual. He will, I hope, spend the rest of his life being bought drinks on the strength of it...

(By the way, we get tornadoes as well. Little ones. Almost every year, there's a "Shock, horror! Tornadoes strike Britain!" headline, where some little twister has lifted a roof or two in Birmingham. It's usually Birmingham.)

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

If I were a tornado in the UK, I would definitely aim for Birmingham.

My son has informed me that we do not and indeed cannot be struck by lightning in Hawaii. There can be (as there are very very occasionally) thunderstorms nearby, and one can see lightning in the sky, but the islands are supposedly not big enough to trigger that effect in which the lightning strikes the ground. I don't know the meteorological details, or even if he's right. No tornadoes here that I know of but maybe a rare dust devil.

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

I think my earthquake occurred in 1972. The quake in the Pyrenees was felt all the way to Bordeaux. The door to the balcony on the 4th floor of our building opened by itself, and my mother who was in bed came running, because the bed had shooken a lot. But I was standing up in the kitchen, and my father was nearby, and neither of us felt the tremor. So sad.

[bluehairsue.livejournal.com]

The earthquake woke me up. I thought "That's either an earthquake, or a cat getting off the bed." And turned over and went back to sleep.

Had a much more dramatic time in the Cumbrian 1980-something earthquake (when I was living in Barrow-in-Furness). It was early morning, I was awake, sort of, and lying in bed, when suddenly all the birds stopped singing, the cat on the bed flattened his ears and said "rrrRRR!" in a very unhappy and menacing way, and THEN the earth moved...