Shocking news always travels fast

OPINION: Sitting around the dinner table last Friday night, we were talking about bad news. The different ways in which it's delivered, the moment of receiving it, and the way that, afterwards, the world is altered.

Knut told of growing up in Norway in the 1970s, when bad news of a personal kind could be broadcast over national radio. If you were travelling long-distance and couldn't be reached by phone, you might hear your own name on the car radio - at which point you had to report to the nearest police station, expecting to be told that a relative had died.

Another friend told a story that no-one wants to live through. A plane from Ankara to Berlin, a loud bang, and an announcement of mechanical problems - followed by a nose-diving emergency landing. Stranded for hours on a middle-of-nowhere runway, without phone coverage, she could only think of her husband. What would he be feeling, waiting at home, knowing something had gone wrong but not knowing what?

Bad news travels fast. The saying's always relevant but as technology changes, the definition of "fast" alters too. Bad news used to be delivered by word of mouth, by foot messenger or horseback rider. Next there was radio and telegram. Now, bad news can be delivered almost instantly via phone or internet - but only if you happen to be on the end of a phone line, or connected to the net, in the aftermath of disaster.

Last Friday, as we were sitting down to dinner in Berlin, it was 5am in Canterbury and the ground there had been violently shaking. Buildings groaning, houses thrown from side to side, chimneys tumbling, water-pipes bursting. Strangely enough, here in Berlin, someone had just mentioned earthquakes. Two of us were Cantabrians by birth. It seems odd, somehow, that we had no inkling of the simultaneous chaos in our home country. No spine-tingling, no hairs rising on the backs of our necks. We sat there unwittingly and we continued to talk about disaster in a general rather than specific way; we ate peaceful risotto and drank quiet wine.

A couple of hours later, unbeknown to me, the phone in the next room rang. Many writers are perennial non-phone- answerers, and I'm no exception. When working to a deadline, or not wanting to be interrupted, I turn the phone down so low that I can hardly hear it. I've always been haunted by Rick The Ice- Storm Moody's story, of how his sister died in hospital without him knowing because his phobia of phones had prevented him from answering any of his parents' desperate calls.

Thus I didn't hear the news of the Christchurch earthquake in its immediate aftermath. I heard about it many hours later when, cleaning up after the dinner party, I put some chairs back in my work room. It was then that I noticed the red light blinking on the answer machine and, belatedly, I heard my mother's voice. She'd called wanting to reassure me that she and my other relations and friends were safe, before I heard about the disaster via any other source.

I called back, of course, asking what Wellington poet Lauris Edmond (no stranger to quakes, both physical and emotional) called the "small enveloping question". Are you all right? And this question was later asked of me by people calling from Sweden, England, France, Canada: is everyone we know in New Zealand all right? It could have been so much worse. But sitting at my computer, looking at images of the devastation, I felt a delayed fear for those I love. And a sadness for my city, which - however long I live away - will always be home.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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