All Together When We Go?

You'll have to forgive my absence these past few weeks.  Dear Henry got it into his head that the conflict in Syria will lead to another Cold War, but this time actually ending in nuclear fallout.

Sure was fun though, am I right?

As he spent most of the 1980s living in an underground bomb shelter, Henry has been trying to recreate one at home using the wine cellar, much to my chagrin.  Daddy would not be impressed by his son-in-law disturbing the vintages after years of settling.

At first I let Henry just tinker away down there, muttering to himself about barrels of pickled herring and vats of clean drinking water, until he moved a load-bearing wooden beam to create a base for a steel wall and the Aga fell through the floor.

Could have been worse, I suppose.

Luckily, this occurred at the end opposite the most valuable and most drinkable wine (we keep them very close together as a sort of ‘wine roulette’ for dinner parties), but it did cause rather significant damage to the kitchen.  I called in our tame structural engineer, Barry (whom you may remember from my green roof plight), and commissioned him not only to repair the kitchen flagstones and replace the beams, but also to help Henry create a proper bomb shelter.

Apparently, Barry is not only a serious 'prepper', but is actually a bit of a nut when it comes to bomb shelters.  He's member number 0012 of the British Bomb Shelter Association and an honorary member of the American Bomb Shelter Organization [sic], which is not to be confused with a certain rather popular Blairite sentencing order.  In 1997, he won the international Van Humpenschrieck prize for best-prepared shelter, named for Hubert Van Humpenschrieck, who disappeared underground during the Franco-Prussian war and didn't reappear again until 1969, having been perfectly preserved by eating pickled limes and drinking nothing but gin.  Sadly, he (Van Humpenschrieck not Barry) was hit by a bus the very moment he left the structure, which owing to events had found itself underneath lane two of the M74 motorway near Uddingston.

It's bad enough being on top of the motorway

In any case, Barry is ‘prepping’ due to the threat of the apocalypse.  Not being much of a Bible reader, he assumes it will be caused by a natural disaster, hyperinflation, virus outbreak, nuclear war or just a good old gas shortage.  After a brief chat, he convinced Henry that it's not Russia we should keep our eyes on, but the Chinese and North Koreans.  Either way, a nuclear fallout shelter would be relatively easy to install between the wine cellar and the dungeon.

Apparently, when it comes to long-term food storage, the Mormons are a handy bunch to know, but Latter-Day Saints are a bit thin on the ground around Airnefitchie, so we'll just have to make do on our own.  Henry spent some hours considering steel cans and Mylar Bags – one being rodent-proof and one being rust-proof.  I suggested Mylar bags just popped into a steel can without sealing the can, but wished I didn't.  Now there's no stopping them.

I actually spent time with The Other One, as she drove around the entire county trying to find someone selling iodized salt – this following a health scare on the Daily Mail (which people all over California apparently read and take seriously).  This alleged that developing-baby retardation corresponded with the lack of iodine in the pregnant mother's diet, or somesuch.  We ended up purchasing it from the internet in the end.

Who needs a midwife when you have Dr Daily Mail in da house?

For two days we taste-tested great gobs of dehydrated and tinned survival foods (including doggie dinners for Patches and Fang) before Henry bought the final choices for the bunker.  For three days I helped him gather wheat, rice, sugar, salt and beans, though I’m not entirely sure he knows what to do with any of them.  I surreptitiously added our spice rack to the bunker.   Then, for the next four days, I had to convince Henry not to make emergency blankets out of my old Rigby & Peller brassieres lined with tin foil.  On the seventh day (when, it might well be remembered, even God rested) I had to convince the authorities that Henry was not illegally practising medicine, despite the bushels of new hospital supplies in our basement.  It only took one look at Henry for DS MacTavish to be satisfied that he wasn't making drugs with the intent to supply.  Apparently, if you wear a tweed three-piece suit all the time, even when building steel walls into a dungeon, you're exempt from those sorts of assumptions.

I'm really just a drug baron, not a proper baron at all

Eventually, the boys had finished.  Barry was particularly pleased with himself, although a little disappointed that we won't allow him to use our new fallout shelter as an entry in the Best UK Prepper competition.  However, he was buoyed up by the thought of inviting himself to our cellar when the apocalypse eventually eventuates.  We scarcely had time to protest before he swanned out of the castle, whistling 'It's a Small World After All'.

I had a sneak peek at the place when I went down for this evening's wine roulette spin.  As impressive as it is, Henry appears to have forgotten all the gin.

That's all well and good, but I have the world's last non-radioactive cucumber here and it needs some gin!