I HAD logged onto the weekly Olive Press editorial meeting from my home in Granada, my laptop perched on the desk as I scribbled notes.
We were listening as new arrival Chris talked us through a few key editorial changes when, suddenly, a deep rumble thundered through the flat.
Windows rattled, paintings swung wildly from their hooks and furniture creaked as it shifted sideways across the room.
For the 10 seconds the jolt lasted, I could hear the earth groan like some ravenous creature looking for lunch.
Then the tremor gradually wound down, as if its battery had gone flat.
When it was over, I steadied my breathing and turned my gaze back to the meeting.
The editors were literally staring at me, wide-eyed and wordless.
Had they just watched an earthquake live from the office?
They later told me how I had suddenly let out a string of expletives and my face had gone white with fear.
Unfortunately, they joked, it hadn’t been a really big one – just 4.8, in fact – and, worse, we hadn’t recorded the meeting.
Hard to believe, but it was the second time in a week I had been caught up in a dramatic encounter with Mother Nature.
The Granada quake came less than three days after a magnitude 5 tremor shook the city on August 15 – the biggest there since 1954.
I missed that one, while ironically being stranded in Sicily on holiday thanks to a volcano.
Our flight home had been cancelled, alongside thousands of others, after a volcanic eruption forced the airport to shut down for over a week.
READ MORE: Granada earthquake swarm forces 600 people from their homes
For reasons known only to the Sicilian authorities, their main airport sits right beside Mount Etna – Europe’s tallest and most active volcano.
Tens of thousands had their holiday plans ruined when it unleashed its most powerful eruption since 2014.
When I finally made it back to Granada, it took just 48 hours before I found myself experiencing another of the strongest earthquakes to hit Spain in decades.
Thank God I had missed the bigger one a few days earlier.
So it was perhaps no surprise that, while working on deadline at our Malaga HQ this week, my editor Jon suggested that maybe I should ‘go and work somewhere else’.
“The next one might be a tsunami,” he joked.
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