April 24, 2010
Major Quake Rocks Notts
After eight years, I finally went to get this framed. The woman at the framing store informed me that it was a bit beat up, and that framing wouldn’t fix it. I could have told her that the poster had spent two years taped to the back of a door in England, a few years packed in a box, and a few more years stuck inside the pages of a book, and so every crease and tear has been well-earned. I stole this from a newsagents during the autumn of 2002, and loved the boldness and simplicity of its overstatement. I remember the major quake too, and how it sounded like an overweight man was tumbling down the stairs. I was living in a backpackers’ hostel at the time, and we were sitting up late down in the kitchen, and after we heard the overweight man fall, we decided to go to bed. I probably found out about the earthquake on the radio the next morning, and remember seeing this poster and feeling excited to have been a part of something monumental. Living in England in general had that effect on me– something was always sweeping the nation in a way that isn’t possible in a country as large as Canada, and I loved being swept along with it. Even along with shifted tectonic plates. It was a very strange time, anyway, and I cherish it, and this stolen scrap from way back then makes an exciting addition to the wall in our hallway.