It’s another shitty day in Paradise. Our endless days of internment continue with unabated blue skies and powerful rays of sunshine encouraging an indolence that requires a presently absent strength of will to overcome. In other words, breakfast, coffee and the paper on the patio, with no immediate rush to gravitate to anything more productive!
This might not sound like a show-stopper, but I heard an aeroplane overhead yesterday. It was a fast jet and too high to see, probably a Typhoon. It did occur to me though that it might have been a MiG? Supposing the Russians had sussed that we are in total lockdown, that the Brylcreem Boys, rather than being fully booted and spurred in their usual state of Instant Readiness, were in fact lounging in the Officers’ Mess, feet up, doing The Times crossword and oblivious to any enemy intrusion into our airspace? Supposing those nasty commies were just dipping their toes in the water, to see if the normal “scramble” of Eurofighter Typhoons launched into the stratosphere to warn them off and found there were no traffic police, no hindrance to their progress? What then? Would they then feel safe in launching a full aerial bombardment, sending in squadrons of heavy bombers to pepper our fair and native land with a Pandora’s box load of virus-neutralising nukes? Could it in fact be that the Ruskies are in cahoots with their like-minded Chinese friends, who released the bug so that we’d all drop our defences and allow the Russian Bear to unleash it’s holocaustic venom upon our unsuspecting populace?
As a young officer in the RAF Regiment, I spent a hideously tedious three months in Northern Ireland based at RAF Aldergrove outside Belfast. We were tasked with defending the base from unwanted intruders. As a shift commander I was based for twelve hours at a time in a small, over-crowded, smelly Guardroom, surrounded by radios and squawk boxes, flak jackets, rubber bullets and all sorts of other paraphernalia. These were the days, in the early 1970s, when the Cold War was still freezing, when the Nuclear Threat was still very real, when acronyms like MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) were on everyone’s lips and when it was considered that we would get a four minute warning of incoming missiles. To this end, there was a box in the corner that sent out a load beep every 10 seconds (I think, from memory) that was supposed to comfort us that all was well. If ever the beep stopped, our whole world was about to vaporise and we had barely four minutes to run round in ever-decreasing circles, shouting Hail Mary’s and going MAD. I never did find out what the infernal box was connected to…..it might have been a tape on a constant loop in the next door room! (Actually I do know, but I signed the Official Secrets Act and I’d have to kill you if I told you).
Meanwhile….. perhaps it really was a Typhoon on a training sortie, flying a different navex route just to keep the boys sharp? Maybe I’ve been reading too much Aldous Huxley and George Orwell? Still, it’s as well to be prepared. You can’t be too careful these days. I’ve been doing a lot of digging recently (literally not psychologically) so perhaps I should go a lot deeper and create a family shelter; bomb proof and virus proof, perfect for prolonged quarantine?
Oh sod it, back to the patio and another coffee; decaffeinated of course.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 