Feel the earth move?

GNU BRITAIN

We did. At 5.40 on Sunday morning, Baby Gnu woke me up crying (he was crying, not me). By the time I'd found my dressing gown and made it to the door of the bedroom, he'd stopped (he regularly does this sort of thing - there'll be payback, you mark my words).

Anyway, I got back to bed but - in a pattern which has become uncomfortably familiar - I couldn't get back to sleep straight away. Just after six, I heard a kind of muffled bang. My immediate thought was that something had fallen into the bath downstairs (it was the same kind of muffled but echoing noise you hear when something falls into a ceramic bathtub). But it went on slightly too long, and was slightly too loud. Oh, God, I thought, some piece of furniture has fallen down. But, no, the bang continued to rumble (the way I'm describing it, you'd think it was three minutes long, but it was only a few seconds), and I could tell it wasn't coming from inside the house. Mrs Wildebeest woke up and suggested that it might be a plane coming down (we are within four or five miles of Heathrow). We looked out of the window, but obviously were none the wiser. Assuming it would be on the news if it were anything important, we went back to bed (good old British nonchalance, eh?).

Neither of us imagined it would be something like this, nor that it would in fact have taken place over thirty miles away.

Baby Gnu slept through the whole thing.

[EDIT: Live blogging of the event at The England Project (via this week's BBRU, hosted by Devil's Kitchen, for a change).]