Tadley Tidbits
Conservation in the pub on Friday night:
Man at Bar: “From listening to you I’d reckon you are European.”
“Wow…” I pondered this for a while, looked around, shrugged and added: “Aren’t we all?”
Shocked silence. The man looked at me aghast. So did the other people lining the bar three-deep.
“I mean—last time I looked, Britain was part of Europe.”
In the resulting silence I grabbed my pints and headed back to the table. For a moment I had forgotten that I live in the Tadley Universe.
Nothing but green fields…
A knock on the door on Sunday afternoon: T, a former Goldsmith’s postgrad and now maths lecturer in Reading, had dropped by for a visit reckoning the cool, clear day was ideal for cycling (he’s Dutch). He was a little addled and worn-out. Shaking his head he spread the Ordnance Survey map on the living room floor and pointed at the shortcut he had planned to take—when he had ran into a perimeter fence that looked like a scaled-down version of the former East German border.
“Ah…that is AWE—our Friendly Neighbourhood Atomic Weapons Establishment!”
“But”, he continued to shake his head: “There’s nothing there but green fields!”
We showed him the map in our information leaflet where the facility and its smaller neighbour where marked with fat yellow splotches, surrounded by a fall-out radius centred on the nuclear reactors they don’t have.
But it is true—neither facility is marked on the ordnance maps of the area. Their existence is hardly a secret, AWE even has its own website and regularly advertises job offers in New Scientist. Perhaps they reckon by not marking it on the map they make it impossible for terrorists to find and crash an airliner into it.
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Denni