Carrying On
It’s over a week now since the 7.1 earthquake hit Christchurch, and 5 days since I returned home form Aussiecon to be greeted by another 5.1 ‘quake. So ok, we’re still getting “aftershocks”, which vary between a sharp jolt with a bit of shake and rattle thrown in, to what I call the “long roll”, which feels quite a bit like being caught in a deep swell at sea. Since the experts say that the original ‘quake was very much like a big wave rolling through the earth, perhaps it’s not surprising that some of the aftershocks also feel like wave action.
For me, the tidy up is pretty much done, but for
others the news is not so good. A kind of building triage has been done, so some of those buldings with “Not OK” scrawled over windows and doors when I returned from Australia now have yellow or red “cards” on their doors. You may recall I mentioned my favourite local bar last week—sadly, it has a red card and given the damage to the building overall, I have to say that the prognosis is not looking good.
So not over yet—not by a long way, the people I know who work in infrastructure tell me—but settling down, and what the experts advise us to do is get back into a normal routine, as much as we can. For me, this means back into the writing, because book contracts and delivery deadlines wait not for time, tide, or earthquake! But despite the disappointment of the Christchurch Writers’ Festival, which was scheduled over last weekend, having to be cancelled, it feels good to get back into things and work on a few of the fresh ideas for WALL2 that emerged while I was in Melbourne.