 eurozone by kate 1: the earth moves Am I a vagabond? Well, I have been. I spent the winter in Asia and the summer in the Mediterranean, so that made me one, for a while. But now I’m back in old smoky London, I am home, even if with my current income I’m not far off the second definition dictionary.com gives for the term. So in order qualify for the title of vagabond, I’m just going to ramble on about something that interests me in this, the first of a series of articles that will cover a lot of ground (even if I don’t). I’m not going to try and educate you American readers about London life, or even tell you much about myself, but the odd thing will no doubt slip out. The only thing that you will have to learn is to cope with British English spellings. So, on with the first thing that comes to my roving mind. Lets start with a cliché. Everyone knows that the British talk about the weather non-stop, and I’ll tell you why. Nowhere else can you have thundering rain, warm sunshine, a breath-frosting night, a balmy evening and an earthquake all in three days. OK, so I slipped the earthquake in there to trip you up. But it is actually true. At 1am last Monday morning my bed started shaking and squeaking. It’s one of those iron bedstead type things that your grandma probably had, and it squeaks readily when I have an enthusiastic lover but not often at any other time. I was half way to sleep, and at first thought that a very, very big lorry must have gone down the road and shaken the foundations of the Victorian converted house I live in. But my semi-conscious mind wouldn’t accept the enormity of the required truck for very long. So perhaps my raging Irish neighbour had moved back in and was managing to rock the walls with her fury? No, not even she managed to make the ground move that much. Had my current beau had slipped in to my bedroom unheard? Unfortunately not. I only calmed my mind down when I realised that it must have been an earthquake. I could then fall asleep, satisfied. But it’s a very unusual phenomenon in the UK, and unusual too that I was so readily mollified. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, one man’s first reaction to the quake was "Oh God. They’re bombing Birmingham." In Dudley, where the epicentre of the tremor was located, police reported that 12 people walked into the station in their nightclothes in a state of alarm. You see, we British are used to hearing about earthquakes on Californian fault-lines and in Japanese cities, and we remember the thousands who died in Turkey in 1999, but England is supposedly far and safe from volcanic activity. But I have a theory for both the unusual geographic location of this quake, plus my own complacency, and I find it convincing. In India in 2001 I slept through an earth tremor. In Crete in 2002 I slept through another. So the volcanic activity, scorned by my lack of concern, followed me all the way back to London to make me stand up and take notice. And I have. Earthquake, I hear you! Earthquake, I bow to your force and power! I can no longer ignorantly sleep through this demonstration of your fiery energy, and I dedicate this public acknowledgement to the very fact! So now, can you please go back to where you belong and are expected? It’s not nasty of me to push this one onto you earthquake zoners – there were no casualties in the British quake, it was just a little shudder that you probably wouldn’t even notice with your experienced, quiver-proof skins. So I am appealing for a little generosity, a little global give-and-take, a little more of us all sticking to what we’re good at and used to, and a little more stability under my feet. It’s not a lot to ask, and I have done my bit by staying awake for this one. Can we agree? Is it a done deal? If, as in the (approximated) words of T.S. Eliot, we travel in order to see the place we come from for the first time, then I do see things differently after a year on the road. And this earthquake should not be troubling, as it illustrates the point that this place I call home isn’t quite what I expected it to be. I may have done my vagabonding, but coming home’s going to take some getting used to. |
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