Richard Baum

I was woken up by the earthquake last night, as were many people in the area, I’m sure. Unfortunately Tam slept through the entire thing, thus robbing me of what will probably be the one and only chance I get in life to ask “did the earth move for you” with genuine interest.

A number of things struck me about the overnight tremors. First, my brain must have sensed that something was going on in the Earth’s crust, since it woke me up about 30 seconds before the action started. If only I could somehow isolate that part of my brain and apply it to football matches. I could catch up on much-needed sleep whilst hours of spirit-sapping tedium took place in the muddy centre circle, and have my brain wake me up in the few seconds before a goal.

The lurch from ”asleep” to “awake” did induce the “half-asleep” side-effect that gave the whole thing an even more disconcerting air. Not only did I have to contend with the unlikely fact that the earth below me was shaking violently, but I wasn’t quite sure whether I was awake or not. For a brief time I thought it was just a heavy train going past the house, and it genuinely did take a good few seconds for me to realise that I live miles from a train line.

After I had calmed down (I was scared like a baby, I am happy to admit) I also became glad that my new house is devoid of a chimney stack, because if there had have been one it would almost certainly have toppled over and landed on my car. Or my head.

And as the dust settled (almost certainly choosing to settle on the newly cleaned Prestwich Village centre), I became joyously thankful that I don’t live in California or Japan, where 5.2 magnitude earthquakes are to them what mild breezes are to us. I can’t really imagine what a 7 or 8 magnitude quake would be like - I’d probably have been tossed into the air along with everything I own, landing on something sharp. And doubtless Tamsin would still have slept through the whole thing.

Watch out for the next St Mary’s Labour Rose newsletter, and the headline which I predict will be a mixture of “Lib Dem / Tory alliance conspire to destroy Prestwich with new fault line” / “Vote Yellow, Get Quakes!” / “Lib Dems fail Prestwich as pot hole discovered leading to Earth’s Crust”

And of course our retort, which will be that we support this new fault line. In 21 years of Labour controlling Bury, the earth barely shook once. Give the Lib Dems 18 months in Prestwich, and we’ve pushed the Richter Scale up to 5.2 already! Service, action and geology all year round!

Rick