Quakes and killers

My first experience of an earthquake. I was sitting in the breakfast room having my tea at about four o’clock when suddenly out of nowhere the table went bananas as did the chair I was sitting on, as did the floor beneath my feet, the fan above me and the hanging light. It didn’t last long, no more than a minute or so, but it is quite a scary experience and in fact makes one, well made me, feel slightly nauseous. Not having experienced it before it took a couple of seconds for the penny to drop. The guys were out doing some filming and arrived home five minutes later. Whilst driving they had felt nothing. Douglas immediately went to the computer to check the situation and discovered the quake took place 82 kilometres west of Xania and was 6.4 on the Richter scale. We haven’t discovered any damage though the quake was felt as far north as Athens and as far south as Egypt. It wasn’t the first earthquake occurring since we came to live on Crete but with the previous three or four I was fast asleep and felt nothing. There were no after shocks, not that I know of anyway and I don’t know of any damage to buildings elsewhere but there must have been closer to the epicentre. That, being at sea and evidently quite deep, was the cause of a small tsunami. The fact that we suffered no damage is theoretically down to the house being built on bedrock and able to withstand a certain amount of movement. Looking up at the swinging light above me I had images of the earthquake scene in the movie ‘San Francisco’ I saw as a kid and, at the time, almost had nightmares over, especially the swaying chandelier before it comes crashing down.

I see on the news there has been an earthquake of 7.2 in the Philippines that has caused some damage and killed twenty people. Is there that much difference between 6.4 and 7.2?

A photograph has been pasted on Facebook of three men each holding up in front of himself a fully grown dead leopard. Trophies to boast to the world how manly they are. Why did these beautiful creatures have their lives cut short by the idiotic machismo of three… I would call them by a four letter word but they are in my opinion so low to do so would demean the object mentioned. The caring world is worried about its diminishing fauna: elephants for their tusks, rhinos for their horns, sharks for their fins, whales for their blubber, gorillas for bush-mean, orang-utans by losing their habitat, the big cats to these idiots, various species for useless traditional medicine, dolphins slaughtered by the Japanese and crazed Danish peasants as ignorant and as stupid, as uncaring as these three shameful individuals. I know in the wild it is a case of eat or be eaten but that is nature and this deliberate senseless killing for so-called sport is inexcusable and should have died out with the big white hunters of colonial times; and shame on Zambia for allowing it to continue. It’s not worth the money.

Fantasy time. ‘Oh look at me, world! I am an intrepid big-game hunter.’ Unfortunately you are also a total wanker and there are far too many of you. It would be poetic justice and Africa’s revenge if a little thing like a malaria mosquito put an end to you.