What the hell was that???

An earthquake actually.

Was just mooching to bed when at 0057 the house shook, I shook, in fact every damned thing shook and the cat legged it out of the door. It felt rather like a heavy freight train was going past the back door; except that they pulled the line up about fifteen years ago.

How weird. Wandered into the street to discover that most of the neighbourhood have been woken and had much the same idea. No light in the sky so that's a plane crash or a tanker accident on the main road out of the question. A look on the net reveals that folks in Norwich, Manchester and Nottingham have felt it; other checks reveal it's been felt in Liverpool; via radio the USGS are saying that the epicentre of the 4.7 magnitude quake is only about fifteen miles south of my location.

Well, what can you say about that other than... to paraphrase Weebl and Bob.... "How rare"!
The good news is everyone's alive, nothing seems broken. And what a horrible sensation. I don't like things being that out of control...