Cold days, A Special Birthday, an Earthquake and Hospitals!

A couple of weeks ago we had a real cold spell in the weather and I mean cold, we had such a heavy frost one morning that it looked like snow and it didn’t thaw at all. You can see what I mean from the photo’s I took; we had to wrap up our horses with several rugs and neck coats.


We then celebrated my sister Sarah’s 40th birthday on Sunday 17th February by having her and her and her lovely family - husband Kelvin and children, Lydia, Ella, Chester and Finley - over for dinner oh and their gorgeous dog Monty came too. We had a fun afternoon together.

Then amazingly we were woken just before 1am last Wednesday 27th by an earthquake – yes an earthquake in England and a 5.3 on the Richter scale, with the epicenter in Market Rasen in Lincolnshire which is only about 65 miles away. I literally felt the last few seconds but Steve said he was woken just before and heard and felt it for the 10 seconds that it lasted. It was pretty scary. Thinking that that I was dreaming a said ‘Steve did you feel that?’ not expecting a reply as Steve is a pretty deep sleeper he said ‘Oh yes’, he then tried to convince me that it was the heating pipes in our house and I thought ok I know this house is over 300 years old but we have real problems if that was the pipes. I said ‘I don’t think so I think it was an earthquake’, but then other thoughts came into my head like was it a nuclear bomb or possibly an airplane crashing nearby and so I decided to ring Jess and Ben in America. They were somewhat surprised to hear from me at the time until I told them that I thought we had just experienced an earthquake and would they mind looking on the internet. They couldn’t find anything and then I remembered that the BBC run their News 24 programme on one of the TV channels through the night and so I put the TV on.

Steve was more or less asleep and I was just annoyed that I couldn’t confirm my suspicions, when with the TV turned down low I noticed the words EARTHQUAKE and in a load voice making Steve jump I said ‘I told you it was an earthquake’ to which he replied I know I said it was the pipes because if I said an earthquake you would be ring people and putting the TV on, but you did anyway, so can we go back to sleep now?’ Luckily because of the time of day there were very few injuries, although the earthquake was felt by most parts of our rather small country.

Well on the same day my Mum had a nasty fall and seriously injured her leg, if you would like to see a photo check out Ben’s political blog which you can access from our blog, it’s called ‘Ben – Chew the Fat’, however I don’t recommend that you look if you have a weak stomach. My Mum was standing on a stool in her bedroom when the stool fell from under her. As she fell her lower leg caught the edge of the dressing table which literally ripped the skin from her leg getting wider (like a ribbon tare) as it went up the leg stopping just below the knee, so she had a large triangular piece of hanging flesh (you can’t really see that from the photo on Ben’s blog). I actually took the photos with my mobile/cell phone of the photos that the hospital had taken.

An ambulance was called and she was rushed to the hospital and she was later transferred to another hospital where they had plastic surgeons which they deemed necessary because of the seriousness of her injury. Once at the new that hospital she was put in a room with 5 other patients and was seen by a doctor who said that wouldn’t operate until the next day, this was about 10.30pm and the accident occurred at about 3.30pm. This was somewhat disappointing as the wound was open and not properly dressed, which really worried my Mum and myself. When she had the surgery the next morning some of the skin had died and a skin graph from her upper leg was necessary to complete the operation. I can’t help feeling this would not have been necessary had the surgery been done with in a few hours of the accident. So we are hoping a praying for a speedy recovery and no infection.