The video below (and here) is of Hack Green "Secret" Nuclear Bunker which we have been meaning to visit for some time. We finally got there on Friday. Many of these sort of things fail to impress me because the realism has been removed in the name of heritage (two mutually exclusive concepts as far as I can see) but at Hack Green the very structure of the building makes it difficult to leave it as anything very different from the purpose it was created for. The lower floor especially has been left pretty much as it was in The Cold War - all the various control rooms are as they were, and as you can see the low-level lighting adds much to the ambiance. The children were slightly disappointed that the buttons were almost all no-touchy but the sheer number of genuine flashing lights seemed to make up for that. Entry is via a pretty-realistic NAAFI overshadowed by genuine weapons of mass destruction - do I win the prize for finding them? The rest of the place consists of a tour of either museum-like cabinets of various Cold War and Atomic-related ephemera or the actual rooms of the bunker as you see in the video. Children were pleased to able to test the beds in the ladies dormitory. We emerged blinking into the grey Cheshire afternoon with post-time-travel-stress-disorder. My nephew is responsible for the choice of music on the video. More Photos Here.
Culture Section.
1. Books
Currently reading A Mind of its Own by Cordelia Fine.
However, it was pushed on the stack while I whistled through this :-
Who Writes This Crap? by Luke Wright and Joel Stickley - an attempt to document all the writing that one person reads in a single day (November 1st 2007 I think). It is all parody of course - some of it straight and some of it outrageously not straight. The humour is on the dark side with an ambiguous ending that left me slightly creeped out. However, it is possibly as much of a warning as Nineteen Eighty Four so ... err ... be warned.
2. Films
Random choice from the library DVD racks was Infamous, one of the two recent films about Truman Capote and his investigations that led to In Cold Blood. I did not really know anything about TC beyond that he wrote In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's and spoke like Donald Duck on Helium ( but that doesn't mean you shouldn't watch the film - it did not distract me). Somebody once lent me a copy of In Cold Blood but it had been annotated in great detail by someone obviously much taken with the crime committed and I jettisoned it unread. So watching this film brought to me the great and welcome surprise that Harper Lee was one of the main characters along with the even stranger (to me) fact that Truman Capote was the model for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sandra Bullock played Lee in a way that reminded me of Scout as I suppose she should. In fact the entire film had the slow grace of To Kill a Mockingbird but maybe that is just because the idea is in my head. Thank Goodness for Random.
3. Mathematics.
Nice to see that Marcus du Sautoy has been given the Simonyi Professorship of the Public Understanding of Science in the stead of Richard Dawkins. There is a nice article here.
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