(Consternation: Amy Jenkins and husband Fred discuss the potential for compensation, in whispers so as not to wake the children.)Terror deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri has expressed shock and disappointment over the fact that Terror was not at the forefront of British people’s minds as they groped for explanations for the faint rumble heard by many light sleepers last night.
The rumble, which lasted two seconds and may have knocked up to three sheets of A4 paper off a shelf near Bourne, was caused by a small earthquake, “but in the dead of the night as British people sprang from their beds wondering what on earth that faint rumble was, we’d have expected Terror to be one of the main things they thought of,” said Al-Zawahiri. “And yet, when I looked in the papers, I was dismayed to see that Terror didn’t even make the top twenty.”
Instead, the list was topped by “a lorry reversing”, followed closely by “air in the pipes”.
“There was this almighty faint murmur,” said resident Amy Jenkins. “I thought: God, that sounds just like a heavy vehicle passing along the main road across the other side of the Arboretum! When I woke my husband, he said I must have imagined it; but in the morning, we found three sheets of foolscap on the end room floor, and a leaflet about footpaths in Bourne was listing. It was hell.”
Aid is already flooding in to the affected street, including specialised dog-teams: mainly ‘setters’ to set the leaflet straight again.
The earthquake, which measured 5.2 on the Beaufort Scale, also caused widespread distress to pets: “Our hog, a Lincolnshire White, slept through the whole thing,” Mrs. Jenkins, “but what dreams she must have had!”
Compensation claims are expected to stretch into the middle tens.
