Rumble rumble

Apparently everyone in the entire country was woken from their slumbers at 1am on Wednesday morning, by a huge earthquake. Of course, this is huge in the British sense of things, where a huge snowfall is a couple of inches, and a huge wind is a 60mph gust. For a country that has no extremes of weather whatsoever we seem to have a lot of problems with it.

Anyway, I'm unsure if I was woken by it or not. I do know that at some point during the night (I do not know when) I was woken by a rumbling that I thought was a lorry driving past. Given that I was sleeping in a Premier Inn, flanked on one side by a huge petrol station frequented by lots of big trucks and on the other by the A14 and A1, this was not unlikely. So I cannot say for sure that I experienced this earthquake.

But what made me laugh was when I was watching the news the next morning (Well, later on the same morning, but you know what I mean), and they were interviewing a guy from Lincolnshire who was close to the epicentre.

He was describing his experience and said "Of course, the first thing I thought of was 'it's terrorism'".

Terrorism? In bloody Lincolnshire? Are you mad? I can just see Osama Bin Laden sitting in his Afghan cave, going through a list of potential targets... "New York? Done that. London? Done that, too. Paris? No need, they'll surrender anyway. Berlin? No, they might actually catch us. Rome? Is there even a government there these days? So... oh, I know! Lincolnshire! We can blow up a field of turnips. That'll set the Western economy back years."

Idiot.

Knock knock

Almost two years ago the local newspaper ran a story about how they were going to clean up graffiti in the town. To illustrate the problem, there was a photograph of a policeman standing in a rear-access alleyway, outside a garage door that was covered in the stuff. Not the art of vandal-cum-artist Banksy, but the pointless scrawling of what I believe are called "tags".

Yes, you guessed it, the garage door in question was mine.

After a year had passed I considered writing a letter to the same paper, asking why my garage door was still the same mess it had always been, but never got around to it.

Come to think of it, some time before that article was published, I actually had a visit from a couple of officers who said they had caught one of the aerosol-armed yobs who had defaced my garage door and needed me to sign to the effect that I had not allowed him to do this. I had presumed - naively - that he would be made to clear up his mess, but as we all know crime has no punishment these days and his scrawl remained.

However, last night the doorbell rang whilst we were bathing Joe. I went downstairs and opened the door to discover one of those pretend policeman standing there. You know, those Community Support Officers that can't actually save drowning children because they haven't been trained, so rather just stand and watch them die. Anyway, this officer (quite a pleasant chap, in fairness) said that they needed me to sign a permission form for them (well, the council) to clean the graffiti off of my garage door. And what's more, it'll be done every year, should it need doing (We'll see if that holds true).

Amazing. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, but turn they do.

The more fun game will be counting how many days it is before somebody spots the blank canvas and decides they have the right to vandalise my property again.

A Lot(to) of coincidences

Here's one for odd coincidences:

Sunday morning I awoke after having a fairly vivid dream in which I won a lot of money on a fruit machine, of all things.

Upon mentioning this to Ele, she said that she had a dream that night in which I should have won the lottery, but didn't because I hadn't bought a ticket.

Given that I had bought a ticket, and these dreams involved the lottery and winning money, I thought I'd better check the numbers.

And? I'd won! Only £10, which is about £7,999,990 short of what I was hoping, but nonetheless was eerily coincidental.