Tremors

Whilst not living up to the Kevin Bacon classic, Birmingham's earthquake last week seems to still be a fairly hot topic of conversation, which is bizarre given how entirely underwhelming the whole incident was in this area of the UK - a bit closer to the epicentre you could understand it.

This was my third earthquake, of which none have been particularly tremendous. The first was when I was living in Rome in 2000. It was obviously fairly small as it's been difficult to find any information to corroborate my hazy memory. According to one site it was 6 on the Mercalli scale (about 5 on the Richter scale - who knew there were so many ways of measuring?), but we were a fair way from the epicentre in Subiaco so didn't feel a great deal where we were. I'd had a hard night on the tiles on the Friday so at 11:30 the next morning was unsurprsingly in bed. Feeling the bed shake with a chronic hangover is an oddly disturbing experience.

The second was the Dudley earthquake of 2002 (causing millions of pounds worth of improvements as the joke goes...). I'd returned to Birmingham to start my PhD and was living in a shared house in Harborne. It was late night so again I was in bed. The house shook and caused general confusion. People were on the streets and hanging out of windows to see what had happened. One of our housemates thought there'd been a gas explosion so thought the best way to check this was to fire up the hob. Idiot! That's Physics postgraduates for you. What was more amusing was my other housemate. The week before we'd been doing some epic get-to-know-you drinking and I'd consumed a fair number of ciders. Strangely though I couldn't get drunk. I'd gone to bed sober but woke up in the middle of the night to go the the loo, but on my travels managed to pass out drunkenly on the landing. The night of the earthquake I was fairly offended to find out that she was convinced the earthquake was just me passing out on the landing once more. Apparently I am heavy enough to register 4.8 on the Richter scale...

This time there was very little confusion on my part. I'd only just gone to bed after a (non-drinking!) night at the pub and had only been there a few minutes when the bed shook. For a split second I thought it was my noisy neighbour who has been a pain recently but I soon realised that even he couldn't make enough noise to make my bed shake. After a second I thought to myself - "oh, it's another earthquake, I wonder if it'll be on the news tomorrow?" then promptly went to sleep. I probably won't even bother to wake up next time...