What the hell happened?

You may well have been asleep when it happened, but it probably won't have escaped your attention that we recently had ourselves a little earthquake in this country. I was lucky enough to still be up when it hit and jolly exciting it was too as the power of the Earth rattled my light fittings in a touchingly non-threatening way- a bit like having your hair ruffled by Mother Nature herself. If ever a major geological event could be described as 'quaint', this was it.

The following morning I had a look at the quake coverage on various news websites and what caught my eye most of all were the comments at the bottom of every story from people up and down the nation- and what a joy to behold they were! It seemed that everyone who'd experienced the tremor all across this island of ours was united by a common feeling of what a jolly caper the whole thing had been. Testimony abounded of rattling doors, loosening tiles and confused, barking pets but more than that was the community spirit that seemed to be forged from finding out that someone 200 miles away had felt exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. It felt like having a drink in a chat in a huge pub on a lonely hillside when it's utterly snowbound, no-one has to be up for work in the morning and everyone might as well just sit back and enjoy life together. It felt good to be English that day.

Then the Yanks turned up.

By mid-morning, a steady trickle of posts had come through from all over the southern United States written by people who seemed to be dismayed that we could all get giddy about something as trifling as a little 5.2 tremor. "You Limeys!" went the gist of most of them "we get 6.5's three or four times a year. What are you all getting excited about?". Soon the ante had been upped by the good people of California (the ones who created the world's 5th largest economy then put the bloke from 'Kindergarten Cop' in charge of it) who started prattling on about the big quakes they'd had and how they lived on a fault-line that could plunge them into the Pacific at any moment. They seemed to suggest that they knew what real earthquakes were all about and that we should shut up about our little 10 seconds of shaking and stop being so stupid.

Yes. That's right. They live in a country constantly being shaken by earthquakes and yet, in their eyes, we're the ones who are daft. They had decided to live on what is basically a huge crack in the ground where geology likes to have noisy parties, which is crackers enough when you think about it, but then they seemed to feel this was something to brag about! Then I remembered that America's biggest tourist attraction, Yellowstone Park, is just a big volcano that's due to detonate any minute now and yet this is the sort of place most of them liked to go on holiday to. That is when they're not visiting the Grand Canyon which is basically a great big reminder that Mother Nature doesn't like America very much. Obviously, this is a nation with some self-worth issues.

But it's not just Americans that seem to positively thrive on letting the Earth make life as difficult as possible for themselves. Ever since I started watching Ray Mears' 'Bushcraft' (having read the name of the show in the Radio Times and got the wrong end of the stick completely) I've seen a cavalcade of idiots who've decided to eschew such comforts as central heating and toilets to live like their ancestors in desolate forests and tundra eating bark and washing their hair in pine cones. Not only does Ray, who seems like an intelligent chap at first sight, join in with these people and their desolate existences- he seems to positively wallow in seeking out more and more awful situations in which to plonk himself. In his most recent series he stayed in this country and, despite probably earning enough money off the telly to live in Richard Branson's beard with Jodie Kidd, he still spent his time eating soil in a damp Welsh ditch.

Elderly realtives are, of course, the masters at this sort of thing and like nothing more than banging on about how difficult life has been for them- spending interminable hours at Christmas and weddings banging on to the young of the family about how they used to walk eight miles to school through snow, hail, fire, brimstone and slaying of the first-born. Then when they got there they'd eat slate and get buggered by the Games teacher before trudging all the way home whilst being stalked by the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Nine days a week. Naked.
It really does make you despair for humanity when we've climbed to the top of the evolutionary ladder and colonised the planet for our own selfish benefit and then decided to spend our entire time bragging about living on tectonic raves and watching a man on the goggle-box eat badger droppings while Granny tells us about trooping through hell to a cross between a school and Dachau.

We don't deserve to be where we are. If there'a God, he might as well wipe our ungrateful hides off the face of the Earth with a flood, a meteor shower, a plague; anything really that would stop this planet being populated by a dominant species which seems it rather hadn't bothered evolving at all. Mind you, if that did happen the apocalyptic extinction event had better be quick and thorough. Cause if it was slow, and if anyone slipped through the net, we'd never hear the end of it...