Early this morning around 1:30am I was awakened by a tapping sound just outside our bedroom door.

Andrew wasn’t in bed as he had just returned from a night watching a live band in a dodgy part of town. He was in the lounge room having a quiet cuppa before he went to bed.

As an aside: He goes to these at times but as his music tastes are different to mine. He loves his heavy metal and loves seeing live gigs which all seem to start late at night and there’s never any seating which means he ends up going alone. He tells me the he wasn’t the oldest one there as the band ended up playing songs from the Smiths and the Ramones and all the “oldies” were singing along much to the amusement of the young ones).

So I heard the tapping and I woke up thinking he was playing a joke on me – or the cat. The tapping came from the walls. After about 15 seconds, the tapping stopped and then his head pops in the doorway.

“Did you feel that?” he asked.

“I heard tapping!”

“That was an earthquake. The whole house was shaking,” he said.

“Oh I thought it was you playing a joke on me.”

I didn’t feel the tremor as I was in bed rugged up with the bedcovers but it took a while to get back to sleep.

Turns out it was about 4 on the Richter scale and it’s epicentre was in Sunbury which is about 40km north west of Melbourne. It was the first time that there was an earthquake centre so close to the city.

The last one we had was bigger and back in 2021 (I wrote about it here). and remember it vividly as I immediately knew what was coming and dashed under the doorway of my study with my phone in my hand crouched and waiting for it to pass. Shelves, frames on walls, windows shaking, it was pretty scary.

I don’t remember earthquakes growing up but now, over the last three years, we had a few bigger ones.

At these times, I wonder what damage they’ve done to the house. (Already noticing cracks in walls and ceilings).

Yesterday we saw another big leak in our sunroom, water dripping from the ceiling to the floor. Andrew had to go up on the roof and lay a tarp over the holes in the pouring rain. Turns out there’s sealant that has cracked and needs to be sealed again. All these earth movements reveal new things that need to be fixed.

Sigh. House maintenance never ends. Well, we can be thankful that at least it wasn’t too serious.