It was 1969, and I was lying abed in a country hotel, running a fever. Suddenly, the symptoms seemed to get out of hand as my bed started bucking and leaping, cartoon-style, apparently at its own volition.

I had experienced my first earth tremor.

Flash forward a short while, back home again, when the aftershock to the tremor hit. Mesmerised, as the earth rumbled under my feet, I watched as our fishbowl jerked along the dark polished wood of a sideboard. Fortunately for our fish, silence and stability returned and they lived to swim another day.

Flash forward again, to July 2008, and the 7am rude awakening that was the first of the explosions at the Chelopechene military munitions dump in Sofia. From a bedroom window, I watched the massive plume rising into the sky. Like everyone else in the city, our radio and laptop were turned on in search of what scant explanation there was in the first hours after the blast.

And so to the Saturday night of November 15, and the mighty rattling and rumbling that signalled what was subsequently billed as the strongest earth tremor to have hit Sofia in a long time. Unlike Chelopechene, information was more forthcoming much quicker, and we managed to post a story on sofiaecho.com about 10 minutes after the tremor. Partly because of the internet age; mere moments after the tremor, two colleagues who also live in central Sofia had Skyped me about it.

Reading Bulgarian-language websites also helped to get, so to speak, to the bottom of things, as people exchanged anecdotes from around the city, along with the first conspiracy theories ("my dog did not react, as they are supposed to before an earthquake, so it can't have been one" and "was this Chelopechene II?") and the first sardonic comments ("has anyone checked on the ruling coalition? I do hope they're all right"). Internet information also helped to pinpoint the epicentre - or not quite, because various calculations put it in three different places, including South Park; I waited in vain, to my surprise, for someone to link the incident to the complex of nuclear fallout shelters under the park.

The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences issued an assurance late on Saturday night that there would be no aftershocks, an assertion that lost credibility when, at 7am on Sunday morning, we were woken by the wardrobe mirror rattling in tinkling tune to a 3.5 Richter Scale tremor.

Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov, after an appeal on Saturday night for calm, the following day muttered darkly that the tremors were the result of Chelopechene, an assertion that his namesake, seismologist Boiko Rangelov, rejected. It appeared as if Borissov would do anything to pin any problem on the ruling coalition. At least he stopped short of suggesting their arrest on the grounds of disturbing the peace by causing earth tremors.

Soon after the Saturday night tremor, someone in Studentski Grad posted a note on a forum that he and his girlfriend were in bed awaiting the next tremor. Did the earth move for you, too?