Well.

Much like so many other people in Christchurch at the moment, I don't really know where to start.

Richie Benaud, the world's most ancient cricket commentator (I'm sure he is wheeled into cryognenic storage between seasons. He's like a non-evil cricket-loving Mr Burns.) is the undisputed doyenne of cricket commentary (although recently retired from ball-to-ball stuff). So long did he do his job, so beloved and respected a figure is he, and so closely have cricket tragics such as myself come to know his delivery, his mannerisms and his idioms, that his commentary was elevated to the point at which he could commentate without commentating. The batsman would play a good shot, or perhaps have his off stump removed, and the ball would be speeding to the boundary, or the bails bouncing behind an ecstatic wicketkeeper, and your average, lesser, Johnny-come-lately commentator would be over-excitedly babbling cliches into the microphones faster than you can spit. But often with the Richie Benaud of recent years, this moment of excitement would produce only dead air. Watchers might think that the attention of the commentators had been elsewhere, or perhaps there had been a technical failure. A second would go past; then three; then sometimes five. Silence. And then, the unmistakable voice of Richie: "Well." he would say. (Or sometimes: "Well!") And then, often, no more. He didn't need to say anything else - the Richie Benaud "Well" was description in itself. It was entire paragraphs. It was everything you needed to know. Here's what's happened; here are the images. Will you look at that. Well.    

There's no grief I can express more poignantly than the all-too-many people that lost friends and loved ones so suddenly, which I didn't. There's nothing I feel I can say that tells you any more about the destruction than the hundreds of photos of our beautiful buildings now in abject ruin. There's nothing I've endured like the people out in the eastern suburbs, their homes wrecked, their streets covered entirely in silt, reduced to digging holes in their gardens for toilets and eating cold baked beans by candlelight. There's none of this, and yet there's all of it, and it's everywhere, all the time, all at once.

An earthquake happened, and it destroyed the town I love.


Well.