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The earth never moved for me!
I WAS filing my story from across the other side of the world when a colleague came on the line.
"There's been a major earthquake in China," was the message. But the earth had never moved for me in Nanjing.
In reality, colleagues back in Birmingham with instant access to 24-hour news outlets knew far more about China's most devastating earthquake in decades than I did.
Nanjing, around 1,500 miles north of the epicentre of China's most devastating earthquake in decades, had suffered a barely noticeable tremor, but the sheer scale of the country left this city of around seven million souls mercifully intact.
China is the third largest country in the world after Russia and Canada, has 43,000 miles of railway and boasts 751,894 miles of highway in total.
Getting my brain around the effect on Nanjing of Monday's quake was like measuring the impact of an earthquake in Barcelona on Birmingham, or vice-versa for that matter.
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