Shaken, but not stirred...

So there I was, perusing my morning Telegraph, when I was hit by the full force of the most colossal earthquake to hit these isles in a thousand years:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7267567.stm

Or to be strictly accurate, for there is nothing in God’s own creation that pleases me more than accuracy, I was hit by the full force of the most inane whittering about the greatest non-event to hit these isles in a thousand years.

Most of England, from the Home Counties to some awful northern place, was subjected to a minor tremor, no greater than a knee-trembler in a side-street. To read the accounts of the survivors (i.e. everybody), this was the most terrifying event of their sad benighted little lives.

My God, is this really the land of Churchill, of Haig, Kitchener and Butcher Cumberland? Of Nelson, Wellington and Rodney? Of Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh (who still makes splendid bicycles, I might add)?

Switching on my television set, after the idiot houseboy had locked himself in the coal cellar, I was assailed by photographs showing the devastation which, as far as I could gather, consisted of a bent chimney pot, some skew-whiff brickwork and two cracked teacups.

Why oh why are we so unable to display the stiff upper lip that saw us through two world wars and entry into the Common Market? Whatever happened to that Bulldog Breed, the insouciant officer class and the stolid cockney chappie, all too eager to shrug off the latest assault from the Bosche with a crude working class quip (or punch in the mouth to the nearest dachsund)?

It shames me to admit it, but our slitty eyed brethren in the shaky islands on the Pacific Rim must be chortling inscrutably at our squalid hysteria...