In June 2004, I took my daughters down ‘Scotland's Secret Bunker’ at Troywood, Anstruther, in Fife. Disguised as a Scottish farmhouse, and concealed underground at the end of a 150m tunnel, it was built in the 1950s as one of the regional government HQs for the Scottish secretary and his ministry in case of nuclear emergency. As we walked through the spooky bunkered spaces with their antique machinery of war communications, my young daughters shrank from the sinister horror of it all. They refused to leave the only sunny space down there, a concrete room given over to the anti-nuclear movement, with colourful Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) posters, rainbows and chains of friendly hands. Their reaction made me ashamed of the boyish thrill that had led me to lure my family down there in the first place, all the allure of wartime technology, the rockets and guns on display, the blastproof doors, the Ops room intricacies, the labyrinthine underworld with its concrete imagining of survival by the very few.

By strange coincidence, the week of our visit saw a spectral enactment of my own shame in the form of Ronald MacDonald, a homeless paranoid schizophrenic. On 8 June he used a JCB digger to crash into the bunker after midnight – he stayed down there, in what the papers were to call the Bunker Siege, for two whole days and nights.