March 2014

[iguana]

In March I went to the Ig Nobel Awards tour which surprised everyone with an opera performance, rode a heritage bus and steam train, and visited a secret nuclear bunker.

Dinosaurs, trains, and earth and sand

Pancake Day

For Shrove Tuesday Emily and I went over to Tim's place along with Matt, and we first made savoury pancakes, then (lots of) sweet pancakes to follow. Golden syrup and lemon juice is still my favourite filling.

Ig Nobel Awards Tour

The Ig Nobel Awards, having had the main awards show last year, were doing the rounds again, and we went along since it was good fun last year.

Apart from the start, which involved the organiser enjoying the sound of his own voice a bit too much (odd, given that the winners themselves are very strictly limited in their speeches) there were some very entertaining bits, including some research papers presented by some of the QI Elves, and a recital of some of the worst poetry ever, written by William Topaz McGonagall.

What everyone will remember about the evening was the world premiere of an opera based on a previous Ig Nobel winner, some research about homosexual necrophilia in ducks.

Here's a video someone uploaded of it. Skip to 05:00 for the entrance of the ducks:

Crystal Palace Park

I'd been meaning to visit Crystal Palace for a fair while, and decided that the Green Chain Walk from Elmstead Wood to Crystal Palace was one of the sections that pretty much lacked any greenery, so I took the train instead. Crystal Palace station is an impressive building in itself, but I was going for the dinosaurs.



The rest of the park was nothing particuarly special (the stadium in the middle, which looks like it replaced two massive fountains, from the original designs shown on Wikipedia, detracting the most from the place) but I found the ruins of the palace itself at the top of the park interesting to look around.



Epping-Ongar Railway

On Sunday we headed out to the far end of the Central line, and caught the 339 heritage bus to North Weald station.

The Central line used to run out as far as Ongar, via Epping and North Weald, but now only goes to Epping. In its place at the final three stations is a heritage railway.



We stopped off in the buffet carriage to get some snacks, then walked down the train until we found the first class cabins, and since it was off-peak season, there were plenty of empty ones to choose from.

The journey from North Weald to Ongar took about fifteen minutes.



At Ongar we watched the locomotive detach from the carriages, then reverse down the neighbouring track and re-couple to the other end of the train, ready to pull it back again. Our tickets were valid for the whole day, but we had reason to be in Ongar to begin with, so we watched it depart without us.

Secret Nuclear Bunker

We made a 10km cross-country walk from Ongar to Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker, a decommissioned regional government base indended to be used in the event of a nuclear strike during the cold war.

The outside was designed to look like a regular building, but fortunately it is now well sign-posted.



I don't have any photos from inside the bunker (photography was not allowed unless you wanted to pay another £5) but it was pretty much how you would imagine. Lots of corridors, massive metal doors, arrays of late 70s computer terminals and so on. They had also managed to find a mannequin that probably was supposed to look like Margaret Thatcher to put in the BBC studio, and they had put a John Major mask over a dummy in one of the beds, looking out at us alluringly.

There were some TVs around the place playing the public informational videos of the time. The advice contained in them was highly questionable, designed basically to encourage people to literally entomb themselves in their houses while they died from radiation sickness, under the guise of creating themselves a supposedly fallout-proof blanket fort.

At the same time, the Swiss local governments had (and still have, I think) legal duties to provide nuclear shelters for their citizens. But hey, it was the 80s, Britain was on a budget, right?

The videos laboured each point so much that they ended up becoming funny. This was one of the videos: skip to 11:45 and watch for a couple of minutes. Pay attention to the bit about earth and sand (and earth, and sand).

Earth and sand: totally radiation proof.

We walked another 10km to Shenfield railway station, and caught the train back to London. Over 20km in a day, not bad!