Bomb-de-Bomb

The play seems to be taking off. We have an intensive schedule of rehearsals, our own professional set designer working for nothing because he likes our politics, and a producer who happens to live with the Guardian's theatre critic. Oh, and the English National Opera have given us full access to their warehouse of scenery.

We have the Arcola theatre all to ourselves from Monday June 26th for three days of site rehearsals followed by two actual performances. Lodging and food are arranged and paid for the week, so there'll be no performing with backache from sleeping on floorboards with 12 others.

For the first time, I'm optimistic. There seem to be a lot of big hearted people in showbiz who actually want to see an amateur group with something to say do well.

Now we've just got to learn the lines. Drat, I knew we'd forgotten something.
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Today's visit to the jobcentre was less pointless than usual, because on the way home I came up with most of a short story. Here's the first draft of the first few paragraphs:

"Britain's largest nuclear reactor", the newspapers proudly called it. Although it was in the Republic of Ireland and there were two larger.

Commissioned in 2010, the Darkhill plant had promised local jobs for all and limitless cheap energy. Finished five years late and three times overbudget, most of the staff had been flown in from England, and electricity prices were still rising because the plant was still only working to half capacity.

The government minister who'd championed the plant was in jail for murdering his secretary, the third manager in four years had just been installed, and the press was full of stories about rising cancer rates in nearby villages. And there was a bomb in reactor 4.

It was quite a large bomb, and no one was sure how it got there. But it was definitely a bomb.



In his day, Seamus Hackett had been a world class expert in bomb disposal. He'd known every device and every trick in the book - except he never got around to writing it. He knew every fanatical group of a dozen teenagers led by every unhinged guru with a grudge against every government.

He'd located and defused hundreds of explosive devices, from Harrod's shopping bags of dynamite wired to an alarm clock, to unexploded mines leftover from forgotten wars, to the occasional computerised doomsday gizmo straight out of James Bond. In his day.

That had been 30 years ago, before a series of 'disagreements' with his superiors in the army, six months AWOL with a texan girl, more disagreements and an early retirement 'on grounds of ill health' to state secret memories and 80% proof forgetting.

At 72, he didn't expect to be bundled out of bed by polite but insistant men in dark suits at five in the morning, and driven to Darkhill in military silence. It was obvious his escorts had no idea who he was or why he was needed - but it was also obvious they didn't want him to know that. So he settled in for the ride and felt nostalgic for the old days.

Now he was sitting in an overlit waiting room at 8AM, nursing a hangover and four alka-seltzers, studying photographs of the bomb, floorplans of the power plant, and copies of all threatening letters recived by the company for the last decade.

Cracking, or cack?