Fear gripped me before I realised what was happening – or perhaps because I didn’t realise what was happening. The building jumped from side to side. My chair banging against the desk. My jug spilled water into a small puddle that crept towards my laptop. People around me screamed and dived under desks. I knew I should follow their example – they’d been through the Great Hanshin earthquake of ’95 and should know what to do – but I was rooted to the spot. Fear held me, but so did excitement. This was the feeling I’d wanted in the typhoon.
‘Besides,’ another part of me said, ‘a desk isn’t going to protect me from anything but the roof falling in,’ and with thirteen floors falling on top of me, pushing me down another seventeen, it would hardly make a difference. So I opened a new email and began writing to the distribution I had for my letters home.