I woke up this morning during my annual holiday in the US to find a message in my inbox, already several hours old. A friend, in England, asking if my husband and I were okay. He'd heard about the earthquake in Italy, he said, and he wanted to check in on us.

My stomach slowly rolled over, and I found other emails asking the same thing - notices that friends had queried on my Facebook wall to see if my husband and I were all right, do we live close to the epicenter?

With quiet dread, we checked...