It Can Happen Here

Lying awake waiting for my night shift to start this evening, I happened to feel things shake a bit and some frames creak around me. "An earthquake?" Leaping out of bed and running for shelter came to mind for an instant, but I realised I wasn't quite certain what shelter amounts to... and then it seemed to be over. I made a vague note of the time it had happened.

Then, after getting up to get ready for night shift (nothing seemed to have shaken apart anywhere, and there's a good lot of stuff lying around my place that could have gone somewhere), I checked a news site and realised the epicentre of the earthquake had been some distance off. However unsettling the experience might have been for me, it had been worse for other people... although I did notice in the report that the Prime Minster hadn't felt it. In any case, there have been other mild earthquakes in this part of the world over the years that I've missed altogether.