What is it about earthquakes and Boxing Day? we all wake up woozy and contented, looking forward to finishing up the left-over food and booze, and suddenly the old whitebeard in the sky feels it necessary to remind us of our piggish self-indulgence by sending a huge natural disaster. Last year I shakily trotted off to our traditional Boxing Day events worrying about my friends in Bam; this year I worry about a very dear friend holidaying in Thailand. Maybe it is timely to remind us, at the time of our greatest consumption, of the fragility of the world we depend on to provide us with our turkeys and crackers and stocking fillers.

But it's eqally strange or ironic that the first photo of the disaster I see, on the BBC website, features a South Asian boy climbing over the wreckage, wearing a (fake?) Arsenal football shirt advertising O2, a mobile phone network which no doubt advertises its 'foreign roaming' service heavily. The Arsenal won today, comfortably, but I wonder what the O2 executives think of seeing their logo emblazoned across a disaster scene abroad. I also wonder why the BBC chose that photo out of the hundreds of Associated Press images they could have chosen. Does seeing a man wearing the same shirt as we wear down the pub or the football ground mean we have more sympathy - 'it could have been me'? Or does it look more like one of the British holidaymakers that we all worry about - our friends and relations - as if it were my mate X swept away by a tsunami when he was watching Arsenal-Fulham in the local bar. The sad fact is that most of us do think first of our loved ones and second of the 'natives'. But how shaming that we can export our football shirts to these people and take their money, but when it comes to giving them help, we help only our own.