Weekly Meander #30: Bunkers, birthdays & future archaeology
A quick New Year check-in (and a seascape gift for your aural enjoyment)
Hello friends – and a happy New Year one and all!
Welcome back to my virtual parlour. I know January isn't everyone's favourite month – the morning-after hangover to December's over-indulgent big night out. But I'm very much in favour of easing my way into a new calendar year slowly and restfully. So why not slip off your shoes and make yourself comfortable and we’ll have a gentle catch up, no pressure. We can even imagine a roaring fireplace to make it extra cosy…
I've been allowing all sorts of exciting plans for atomic and documentary-related goodies that I want to share with you this coming year to bed in and slowly take root in my mind during these past few quiescent weeks, as we've transitioned from one year to the next.
But I also want to make sure that my ideas are in line with what you, my valued readers, most want from me.
So very soon I’ll be sending out a survey to drill down into what you're enjoying about my writing - and how I can build on and deepen it, drawing on my knowledge, experience and networks, in the world of nuclear things especially.
Spoiler alert: you can probably expect my meandering updates to become a little less frequent1 as I concentrate more on the topic-based posts than the personal blog-style ones. Though I won't be stopping these completely as I've come to really value and enjoy both the process of writing them and the responses and connections they've elicted from people with whom they've resonated.
I will of course be hugely grateful for all responses to the survey – and I have a few little treats from my nuclear memorabilia stash (yes, I have one – don't you?! 😆) which I’ll be offering up in a little thank-you prize draw as a sweetener too.
But till then, I'm dropping by with this brief meandering update looking back over the end of 2024 and forward into the start of 2025.
Although I've definitely been enjoying the peace and spaciousness of those formless, losing-track-of-what-day-it-is times between Christmas and New Year, rather to my surprise, I have somehow still managed to tick off a fair few activities since the kids broke up for the school holidays back on 20th December.
Here are some of the things I could have written about today:
a trip on 'Antler Airways' with my daughter, nephew & brother
drinking hot chocolate and watching the ice skaters at the Royal Pavilion ice rink in Brighton
an unexpected overnight house guest
a dustcloud-inducing declutter of my home office
attempting to play my flute again after a 25 year hiatus
a last minute Thai green curry with Brussels sprouts for Christmas dinner
meeting my new baby niece
an outbreak of the dreaded chickenpox
and watching a plethora of vintage movies on obscure free-to-air TV channels, at least two of them involving narrowly-averted air disasters2
But instead – and bear with me here - I'm going to do my own version of Jacob Marley's Christmases past, present and future. The analogy is pretty tortuous, yes. But that's just how I prefer them anyway 😄
Bunkers past
Firstly, I'm taking us all the way back to mid-December, to my last week of work before the festive break. Thanks to the various special posts I had lined up in the run up to Christmas, with my one year Substack anniversary and three different collaborations (I'll link to them all at the end of this post in case you missed any and want to catch up), I never wrote the weekly meander post in which I would otherwise have highlighted this.
But really, it's too good not to mention. And I'm fairly sure you'll be hearing more about it over the course of the coming year too. So, what is it, I hear you ask? Well...
I met a woman who owns her own nuclear bunker! In Lincolnshire!
Now I think you should all know by now how exciting I would find it to meet a real life bunker owner. But for said bunker to be in Lincolnshire, where long term readers may recall I have family connections, well, that really was something.
I met said bunker owner, Karen, in the chat on a webinar featuring the work of none other than Min-kyoo Kim, subject of my inaugural The Atom & Us interview. When she mentioned her bunker, I was instantly hooked and we arranged a chat, which finally happened in the middle of December.
She told me how she'd come to buy the underground bunker – one of more than 1500 Royal Observer Corps nuclear monitoring posts built across the UK from the mid-1950s onwards - and her plans for it, which are really creative and inspiring. Here's a photo from the listing when the bunker was for sale before Karen purchased it, which gives you some sense of the claustrophobia of the entryway below ground:
We also talked about the broader nuclear story in Lincolnshire, not the least of which concerns the future long term storage of Britain's high level nuclear waste (the Lincolnshire coast being one of the potential host communities the government is considering). I had already been having a few different conversations about potential projects in the county and the addition of a nuclear bunker into the mix offers some pretty intriguing extra possibilities to consider.
I hope to visit the bunker in person at some point this year so I'll save up a more in-depth bunker post till then – but if you're interested in finding out more in the meantime, there's a directory of nuclear bunkers, monitoring posts and weapons stores across the UK at the Subterranean Britannica website. And as you'll soon discover by googling 'nuclear bunker for sale', Karen certainly isn't the only one who's been interested in buying their own slice of Cold War history over the past two or three year's since Putin's invasion of Ukraine...
Birthdays present
Returning from that brief foray back in time and coming back into the present day – I've had a birthday!
I was born just after the New Year3 so my birthday always feels like a big full stop, marking the end of the Christmas celebrations and a time of inevitable backwards reflection and forwards planning as both the calendar and I tick off yet another year.
This year the day itself was spent pretty quietly, finishing off a particularly tricky jigsaw puzzle (the picture is a 'what happens next' scene from that shown on the box – I posted a photo on Substack Notes if you want to see for yourself) and later on playing a pro-cycling-themed escape room game. Yes, I do love to puzzle!
But the highlight of the day was a late afternoon walk down to the beach with my partner and children, throwing pebbles into the sea and listening to the sound of water on the shingle as the waves rolled in and out. It was beautiful and mesmerising – and I recorded a brief snippet of it to share with you.
There have been other birthdays to celebrate during these Christmas/New Year days too. My young nephew and one of my dear college friends, just a few days older than me, with whom I shared an absolute treat of an afternoon & evening double birthday celebration in London at the weekend, going to an exhibition in Whitechapel and then a play at the Young Vic. A proper pair of culture vultures in our middle years!
The exhibition was a retrospective of political photo-montage artist and activist Peter Kennard and contained an abundance of incredibly potent pieces, many grappling with nuclear weapons, a topic he's focused his unsparing attention on again and again over the decades. I took a lot of photos and came away with many, many thoughts reverberating in my mind. I will try to gather them into some sort of coherence and share a proper post on the exhibition in the next few weeks.
Archaeology future
And lastly, here's where my goofy little analogy finally pays off (sorry!) Yes, future archaeology is a real – and extremely fascinating – thing. And I'm thrilled to let you know that my next installment of 'The Atom & Us' interview series, which will be wending its way to your inboxes soon, will be with a practitioner of this discipline who makes his study of, and I quote:
“ not what present society has inherited and now values from the past, but what we leave behind and expect or hope humans to value in the future.”
His work engages with some of the biggest questions around nuclear waste – and the vast future timescales that go with it. And I'm really looking forward to sharing it with you and seeing what other thoughts and conversations it may prompt.
And with that, we’ve come to the end of today’s little missive. I hope it sparked some curiosity or fellow feeling for you - as always do let me know in the comments.
And if you fancy checking out any of the posts you may have missed over the festive period, as promised the links are coming up just below for your delectation.
With warmest wishes and grateful thanks to you for reading my words. Happy New Year again - and here’s to all good things in 2025.
Vicki x
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In fact, you may have already noticed that they've not really been 'weekly' meanders for a while now!
1970's Airport, starring Burt Lancaster & Dean Martin and the glorious spoof it helped to inspire, the first Airplane movie from 1980, with the inimitable Leslie 'don't call me Shirley' Nielsen.
My mum still feels sore about the other new mums in the cottage hospital where I was born whose babies arrived on 1st January, who were duly showered with gifts and had their pictures in the local paper. As she often reminds me - “you've been late ever since the moment you arrived”!
A belated birthday wishes to you Vicki.
Happy Belated Birthday, sounds like you had a lovely day - love that your Mum complains about you being late! I cannot wait to see what the bunker looks like inside if you're brave enough to go down those steps when you visit it.