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

[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.