Did the earth move for you? Hull wakes up to the earthquake. Photograph: John Giles/PA
It's the morning after the big quake and I'm afraid to look outside. What horror will greet me when I open the curtains? Will the streets seem as familiar, will the skyline be unchanged, or will I be sitting like Michael Hordern in The Bed Sitting Room atop a post-apocalyptic rock pile?
As some of you will know, in the wee small hours of the morning - a minute past one I think, Britain was hit by its biggest earthquake for 25 years. Measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale, its epicentre was Market Rasen in Lincolnshire - an opportunity at last for civic pride. So far, no avalanches have hit Skegness, but there's still time.
The tremor shook Mornington Crescent - I know this because a friend rang to alert me that the earth was splitting in NW1 and the crack was heading my way. She's from Iran, which has an unfortunate habit of collapsing when the earth's plates shift, so she knows what she's talking about. Fortunately, nothing shook in Belsize Park ... nothing much ever does. News 24 barely touched it, and the BBC website carried a report about a man in Yorkshire whose grandfather clock had rattled rather violently, which made me proud to be Britlish.
I've just reread The War of the Worlds, and am halfway through Michael Moorcock's Mother London, which is about the Blitz, so imaginatively at least, I am in the market for a disaster. The population of Britain taking to the roads, the cities emptying and civilization relocating to the hills - I hope this doesn't sound flippant. The reality would be appalling of course, and I'd be missing my home comforts by elevenses.
Still, there is something rather special about the threat of a natural calamity; a curt reminder that we are here on sufferance and could be wiped out at any time. When the china pigs start to move on our mantelpieces and the peas roll off our dinner plates into our laps, we are powerless. Not even a nice cup of tea will save us. Obviously I'm glad that nobody copped it, but imagine being the first person this millennium to be killed by a grandfather clock?
Had last night's quake been the big one, and Britain wasn't waking up this morning to a minor clean up operation and a million dodgy insurance claims, how would archaeologists find you in a thousand years time? Flattened beneath your widescreen television ... which is still on, reclining beneath your duvet at the earth's core, or petrified in the rubble of an all-night garage with 10 Benson and Hedges clasped between your skeletal fingers?
Of course you never know, last night might have been the introduction, the grand finale might come tonight. So goodbye just in case.
