Cumbria Earthquake - 21st December 2010

Last night at 10:59pm I was in the best room in the house for reading, yes I was on the toilet when there was a large noise like a heavy goods vehicle passing close by (impossible where I am) and the house shook for a second or two.  This is not the first time I've felt an earthquake in Kendal so I knew what it was straight away and went straight to the Twitter to see whether others had felt the same.

Twitter light up with local's reporting what they felt was an earthquake, wanting confirmation, one posted a picture of a crack that had appeared in his wall.

The US Geological Survey were first to report the quake as a 3.6 in the hills south of Honister Pass, this was later revised once the British Geological Survey data became available to a 3.5 on the scale with the epicenter of Red Gill Head Moss which is 1.5km north of the Coppermine's Youth Hostel near Coniston.

This is the fourth earthquake I've felt in the north west of England, three I've felt when at home in Kendal (including last nights) and one I felt at work in Lytham last year, I had a phone call from a work colleage in Arnside asking if we'd felt the earthquake, at that point we hadn't but within a minute we'd felt a very slight tremor.

We are not near any plates that cause the big quakes you hear about around the world, but Cumbria does have alot of geological fault lines, in an interview on Radio 2 today an Geology expert said that it's not really known why we get these earthquakes but it's thought to be the related to faults created during our last ice age. 

Here I've pull a drawing of the geological faults from Cumbria RIGS and imposed it on a Google maps, you can see how close last nights quake was to a fault line.

Surprisingly we get alot of quakes in the UK but only 10% tend to be felt by the general public, following is a map of all earthquakes detected in the Lake District - yes there are a lot.

Reading from the Keswick sensor

Kendal Pubs

Last Friday I was out for an annually tour of a few of Kendal's town centre pubs, two things jumped out at me, how quiet some pubs are and the wide range in the price of a pint.  In some pubs it was close to £3 a pint !!

The Fleece had half the pubs closed of with half of what was open devoted to a dance floor that cleared every ten minutes, totally different to 10 years ago when it would be full the bursting.  The Wine Bar and Bootleggers held it's own being , Wetherspoon's had good ale at reasonable prices.

The Fleece received some unfounded interest in a news report in the Gazette a couple of months back on the struggling Punch Tavern's, the gazette placed a photo of the Fleece by the report which made customers think The Fleece was at risk of closing, based on my evening visit last week I would probable of thought the same thing.  In the comments the landlord/lady of The Fleece wrote about the impact the report had made, from their posts to me it looks like they have looked to other income streams (food, group bookings) to mitigate the reducing evening trade.  A week later the Gazette did a report to try and rectify the confusion that inclusion of the photo made.

Kendal used to have a lot of pubs, always popular, possible a high ratio per population than most places, so why have Kendal's pubs been closing, these are few suggests which may apply to some or all:-

Brewery/Chain Rents
I know of at least one pub in Kendal that closed as a result of notice of a increase in rent, landlord rightly wasn't willing to run at a loss and gave notice back to the pub chain that wanted to put in a rent increase.  I think this is the biggest problem, the industry not helping themselves

Wholesale Beverage Pricing
Tide pubs generally have no choice but to buy from the one supplier at the prices dictated, another example of the industry not helping themselves

Business Rates
Rates are charged based on the valuation of the size of the premises, Gazette ran a report this month on 3 local pubs complaining about the rates, but have the chain's just got themselves to blimey for increasing the rents.  Would it be better to decrease the rents and then push to have the rates reduced.

Cheap Supermarket Prices

The industry tries to put the decline in the pub industry down to cheap beer in the supermarkets, but I don't buy that argument, if you have a good pub people will come.

Pub Landlords
For some pubs it can be down to the management, alienate the regulars, be unwelcoming and people will desert in the droves.  Pubs that do well know their customers and welcome new ones.


Change in Customer Base
People are finding other things to do, weekends in front of the TV is king again, go into work after a weekend and people will be talking about TV.

Birdcam - Winter feeding

Been testing out the cheap camera's I got, below is my first attempt, it's a little too close to the subject and I didn't take account that when the bird in on the fat ball that the camera will move.

From the footage I got,  think the bird too some interest in the camera at first before tucking into the fat ball.

 

Virgin Trains WiFi

On Wednesday I took the train from Kendal to Lytham so I could have a drink at the Xmas lunch, normally I do it by car taking around an hour, by train it's an example of why public transport isn't an alternative for alot of people, I caught the 7:05 from Kendal, 20 minute wait at Oxenholme for a connection then another 45 minute in Preston for the Lytham train, getting me into work for 9:30, two and a half hours later.

That aside the reason for this post, Virgin Trains are offering free WiFi access on it's trains until 28 February 2011 after doing a deal with Google, so for the first time I tried it out with my iPod touch.  Have to say I'm not all that impressed, on the way down, it worked, was easy to connect to (although a little slow), but in my 30 minute journey I only used it for 5 minutes to check my mail, facebook, twitter.

On the journey back my iPod could see Virgin's WiFi hotspot but try as I might it wouldn't connect to their network - disappointed.

I've concluded that I would pay for this service, not reliable and I would use it as much as I thought I would.

Tweet

Automatically download BBC Listen Again Programming to your iPod

I like to listen to a lot of speak based radio, but I tend to never have the time to listen when they are broadcast and while the majority of these programme are available on BBC Listen Again this is no good when you want to listen to them in your car on a long commute to/from work.

For the last year or so I've been using Radio Downloader from http://www.nerdoftheherd.com/tools/radiodld/

which has solved all my problems, it will automatically download my favourite BBC Listen Again programmes  to my PC with iTunes will automatically pick-up for sync'ing to my iPod touch to listen in my car.

I've produced a short walk through on how it all works, below press the right button to watch full screen (esc button to return to browser)  

I've also put a longer version (quality lower) on YouTube,