Multiplied up a thousand times plus a few more, the reports from the extended family of the damage done to property & more importantly people's nerves by the quake detail how the Christchurch quake is impacting a city & Canterbury. One family's house flooded by a rising Avon River & quake damage, an aged aunt's home threatened by an unstable chimney that threatens to come crashing down into the kitchen, another's home with cracked foundations and so the list goes on.
Curiously, I find myself relaying messages from one branch of the family to another across the city plain at 8,500 miles distance...
To a city now changed:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills.
What spires, what hills are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
- A E Housman, A Shropshire Lad
And a few much more uplifting lines from Coldplay's Don't Panic:
All in all that I know
There's nothin' here to run from
'Cos yeah, everybody here has
Got somebody to lean on
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