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Something very strange happened last night. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling very startled, although at the time I wasn’t sure why. I just had this uncontrollable urge to leap out of my bed at the speed of lightning and to get out of my bedroom. I started rattling my bedroom door, as if I was trying to escape but because I was still half asleep I felt disorientated so I didn’t remember that my door was closed completely. After pushing the door for a few seconds, I suddenly felt more alert and I thought to myself, “What on earth am I doing standing here rattling my bedroom door even though it’s closed? What am I trying to escape from? Why am I even awake when it’s still pitch black outside?”. I glanced around my bedroom and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. My panicky feeling started to die down, and I assumed that I had just had a bad nightmare but I couldn’t remember what it was. I got back into bed, and I noticed my alarm clock said it was 12:58 am. So I had been asleep for 2 and a half hours, maximum. I eventually managed to get back to sleep again.

In the morning, when I went downstairs to have my breakfast, Mum and Terry said to me, “Did you feel the earthquake last night?” I thought to myself, “An earthquake, are you kidding me?!” You see, we very rarely have earthquakes here in the UK, and even when we do, they are usually very mild and confined to a particular town or county. There has never been an earthquake in my area during my lifetime. Until now, that is. I then looked at the newspaper and saw that it was true – there had been an earthquake, and it happened just before 1am. It was also the main story on the TV news.

So that explains why I woke up feeling startled. I must have heard and felt the tremor in my sub-conscious while I was still sleeping and it must have frightened me so much that I felt an urge to get out of my bedroom. By the time I had woken up properly, the shaking had stopped. However, now that I’m thinking about it, some of the memories from my sub-conscious are coming to the fore – now I can vaguely remember hearing a loud rumbling noise, and the doors and windows rattling.

The earthquake had a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter scale, and it is apparently the largest shock to hit the UK for 25 years. As I’m 24 years old, this means I can say this is the first major earthquake of my lifetime. Also, it didn’t just affect our area, it affected pretty much the whole of England and Wales, although the epicentre was a town called Market Rasen in Lincolnshire which isn’t too far away from here. Here is one of the news reports:

I’ve also been searching on YouTube to see if anyone has got any live footage of the earthquake actually taking place. Unfortunately, this has been quite hard to come by, and of the few home-videos I have found, most of them appear to be fake or staged. I was thinking that surely someone somewhere must have genuine footage of it, even if it’s just a CCTV camera from a 24-hour shop. However, this is the most realistic video I have found. It’s not brilliant, but it’s apparently CCTV footage from a shop in Lincolnshire (ie very close to the epicentre).

As you can probably tell from the amount I’ve just typed about this, I’m fascinated by earthquakes and other natural phenomena!

I do remember a time when I was about 12 or 13 and I was in a geography lesson at high school. The teacher left the room for a couple of minutes to go and fetch something, and all of a sudden the floor started vibrating and I could hear a faint rumbling noise. It stopped for a few seconds and then it started up again. Nobody was sure what it was. I assumed it was an earthquake, but then I overheard someone asking one of their friends (who was in a class in another part of the school at the time) whether they had felt anything. They said no. It seemed to be just the geography classroom that was affected, and there was certainly nothing about it in the news. To this very day, I still don’t know what caused that vibrating sensation. One of my theories was that maybe it was workmen doing some work on the school building, but from what I could see, there were no workmen on the school site that day. However, if I remember correctly, the geography classroom was directly above a science lab. Maybe some people in the science lab were doing some kind of weird experiment which caused the vibrating sensation? I’ll probably never find out.

Now onto non-earthquake related stuff – on Saturday evening last weekend I was invited to the wedding reception of one of Mum’s co-workers. It was held in Drayton and they had really nice food and a disco. I had a really good time. You should have seen the selection of cakes and buns that they had – I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming! (I have a very sweet tooth).

Then on Sunday we went to Raveningham Gardens for a snowdrop and daffodil walk. It was very pretty, and in my opinion much more interesting than the walk through Felbrigg woods we did a couple of weeks earlier.

This coming Sunday will be Mother’s Day. I’ll buy my Mum her favourite Amy Winehouse CD (it’s OK, she doesn’t read this blog anyway), and then I’ll take Mum and Terry out for a meal at our favourite restaurant – Malaysian Delights.

Yesterday (15th February) was my 24th birthday. I booked the day off work and had a quiet morning/afternoon at home. In the evening, I went to Zaks restaurant with Mum and Terry for my birthday meal. I had half a fried chicken with fries, coleslaw and sweetcorn. The chicken was massive! I managed to eat quite a bit of it though, and it was a nice meal. For dessert I had a “Mint Mountain” ice cream sundae, which was good. I also noticed on the menu that they had maple-flavoured milkshakes, so I decided to try one of those, too. I’ve often had maple syrup on pancakes, but I’d never had a maple milkshake before, so I thought it would be nice to try one. However, it was really sweet and sickly and I already felt quite full from the main course and dessert, so I ended up leaving most of it. I had the feeling that if I’d have tried to drink all of the milkshake, I would’ve been sick. Overall, it was really good. But in future, I’d stick to vanilla, chocolate or fruit-flavoured milkshakes.

This year, most people gave me money or cheques for my birthday, as they weren’t really sure what to get me. (I am quite difficult to choose presents for). Today, I went into the city to spend my money on several CDs and DVDs. They should keep me busy for a while!!

As the weather is starting to get better now, we have begun going out more at the weekends. Last Saturday we went to the cinema to see the film Juno. I really liked the film, but annoyingly the fire alarm went off part way through, so we all had to stand outside for an hour until we were told we could go back in. The entire mall had to be evacuated and not just the cinema. It turned out to be a false alarm, and we didn’t miss any of the film as they started it from the same point where we had left off.

Then on Sunday we went for a walk round the woods and grounds at Felbrigg Hall. It was nice to get some fresh air, but there wasn’t much colour as hardly any of the flowers were out yet and most of the trees were still bare. I still took some photos though, and I’ll upload them to my Flickr account shortly.

Work has been going well – my first online report finally went live on Friday a week ago. There were a couple of issues with it, but luckily we managed to resolve them on the same day. My second report is currently in test, so hopefully it will also go live very shortly. A week ago on Thursday, I had my second CII Certificate in Insurance exam. I passed with a score of 92% (pass rate 70%) so I’m really pleased about that. I’ve got one more exam to do in May or June, and if I pass that the course will be complete and I will get the certificate.