At about 00:50 this morning we were all asleep. At about 00:55 this morning someone picked our house up and shook it, or that's what it felt like from inside.
There was a rumble/banging noise, and then some fairly violent shaking. I woke up instantly and looked out of the window, everything looked normal. Clare was also awake and out of bed, neither of us knew what had just happened. I was trying to figure out what the possibilities were; had our house been hit by a large vehicle, train crash, plane crash, subsidence?

Our house is built above some old mine shafts, I was thinking that there may have been a collapse, or some land slide or something along those lines.

I kept looking out of the window to see if any of the neighbours had their lights on, no one else seemed to be awake. I assumed that whatever had just happed was limited to our house.

I spent the next twenty minutes looking for something that would explain what had occurred. I went into the garden to see if the house was damaged, there was no sign of anything unusual. I checked the garage and the front of the house. Earlier in the day I had been stacking boxes in the loft, so I went up there to see if anything had fallen, everything was still in place.

We couldn't go back to bed until we knew what was going on, it was really quite scary and we just couldn't make sense of it.

We called the police at about 01:15 to see if anyone else had reported the same happening to them, it took a while to get through. Before we even told the police what we were calling for they informed us there had been a "Tremor" and that they had been inundated with calls.

So we had been awakened by an earthquake! Right here in the Midlands! The epicentre was about 20ish miles from our place. The tremor measured 4.8 on the Richter scale.