Random acts of violets

Friday, June 03, 2005

All mod cons

Stayed over with some friends the other day at their parental (one direct parental, the other in-law parental, if you see what I mean) home.

Very nice, very large house. Their upper deck could quite comfortably fit my entire house on it, although I would have had to park my car in the kitchen. Which I almost did anyway: very steep drive.

This place had it all, as I discovered on the tour later that night.
"And as we go downstairs we see bedroom, bedroom, bedroom, bathroom, play room, nuclear bunker, bedroom"
Hang on, back up one...

Yes, a nuclear bunker.
a 5 room nuclear bunker.
Complete with the kind of big metal doors that you get on submarines.

We started to explore this at about 11 at night, out on a headland with no lighting of any sort and at least a 5 mile run across fields to get help. I was fairly OK until it was pointed out that it also had an emergency access tunnel that exited somewhere further down the hill. Frankly I've seen far too many dodgy late-night movies to stay comfortably in there, waiting for, I don't know, some sort of power cut. Or maybe a door to mysteriously close.

It didn't have lots of CCTV cameras in place thankfully. That would have been _way_ too much.



Have to point out that the bunker wasn't built by the people who live there now, but by someone else who apparently had to sell it as they ran out of money during the build. That would be the 2000 tonnes of concrete that they decided to pour in the basement. I know bunkers are all the rage, but I'm sure Sarah Beeny could have told them that a well proportioned downstairs loo would have made it a better sale...

Delightful

Ever since I gravelled my front yard so that I can park on it easily, the local cats have been in ecstasy, thinking that I have gone out of my way to provide them with their own, very large litter tray.

Having had on of the little dears leave a present right out side my door this morning, I finally started to clean it up a little. Donning surgical gloves and clasping an asda carrier bag (can't use a Sainsbury's one for this) I started to remove said depositages.

Wasn't until I cleared some of it that I realised the stuff you can _see_ isn't the stuff to be frightened off. Never realised quite how much was being buried.

I am now left with some simple choices:
1. Continue to try and remove by hand
2. Get a large spade, dig out the gravel and start with new
3. Move house.



3. is starting to look like the go-er.