There has been another massive earthquake in Italy. My high school friend, Karen Noswothy, let me know, as we were in transit when it happened. Devastasting.

It is too horrible. When we were safe, others were not.

Thankfully, there were no fatalities, but 15,000 people are displaced in an area north of Rome. Their lives have been upended.

Geoff was in Mexico City in the big earthquake in the early hours of 19th September, 1985, a few years before I met him.

He noticed that his hotel room was shaking, but thought nothing of it and went back to sleep.

He caught the first flight leaving from the airport that morning to Los Angeles. He noticed that it was chaotic at the airport, but thought that it was normally chaotic. It was only when he reached Los Angeles, that he discovered the extent of the devastation and that about 5,000 people were dead.

Growing up in a white, middle-class suburb of Sydney, tragic natural events, like these, felt remote: a long way from sunny Down Under.

Although the bushfires and earthquakes in Australia felt real.

War did not.

The Vietnam war, documented on television, was a big game changer. You knew Aussies were fighting, that it was horrific, that innocents were dying, and that it was an endless, unwinnable war. But it still felt a long way off to me, a teenager, who had never travelled off the island.

I worked in the City during two major IRA attacks. The Bishopsgate Bomb, detonated at 9am on Saturday 24th April, 1993, caused one billion pounds worth of damage. Every window of the building opposite Lloyd’s was blown out, and the streets were covered in work papers like confetti. It was a shock to see what a bomb can do. I had never heard of, let alone seen, bomb damage in Australia. I used to frequently visit a client in that building. I was trying for a baby.

We are back in England soon from Italy. Where there are no earthquakes or hurricanes to speak of.

Mount Vesuvius, which we gazed at from Naples and Ischia, is still active, and it will erupt again. It is hard to believe that, when you are eating pizza and watching Vespas darting everywhere.