Sunday notes

Another brilliantly sunny day, with temperatures on the right side of moderate: 15C. Fifty miles to the south, in the Isle of Skye, the mercury has apparently topped 20C, but I'm quite happy with what we got.

A cargoship, the Isle of Man registered Kielder, came in around midnight last night. She looks as if she's carrying a cargo of coal. As Sunday is a day of rest, she lies idle on the Newton side of pier no 3. Tomorrow, we're likely to see a procession of lorries going and forth to take the coal to the various coalyards.

Down in Folkestone, Kent, dozens of homes have been damaged by yesterday's earthquake. Through today, people have been assessing the damage, and some properties are not safe to enter. Whether the appearance of a 6 inch crack in a chalk cliff in Hampshire is related to the quake, which happened 150 miles away, is not certain. Police evacuated the beach below the cliff as a precaution.

Earthquakes are rare, but certainly not unheard of in the UK. The British Isles sit in the middle of a so-called tectonic plate, which make up the earth's crust. There are a multitude of cracks, along which rockformations move. Each movement results in a quake. Because the islands are not straddling two adjacent plates, a situation found in (e.g.) California, massive, devastating earthquakes do not occur here.