Air raid sirens and Monday mornings

Crikey! I’ve just heard the air raid siren sound. I hear it very often at work, and, thankfully, it is shortly followed by the all-clear siren. Today is the first time I have ever heard it in Aquatom mansion. The wind must be blowing in my direction. Which is a little frightening if they needed to sound a real air raid siren and the wind was blowing the other way. I suppose though they will probably turn it up a little so the whole town could hear it if it was needed for real. Which is hopefully never again.

I know it will need to be tested, so it makes sense to test it at a regular time, but I wouldn’t know where to go or what to do if it was real… or even if it was a real test (you know like sometimes in work they test the fire bell, and other times they test the evacuation process) – but I’m sure we would be told well in advance of a real test where we would need to go. At least, I think I’m sure. I’ll probably just have to follow everyone else running randomly around if not. Eek.

Years ago, they used to test the air raid siren at 11 o’clock at night. That used to always worry me. It was always eerie how it could just be heard within the silence of the night.

I think it is strange how some things we hear are eerie, and other things are simply things we hear. Take a school bell – a hand-bell. Ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding. Nothing eerie about that, unless you hear one on a Monday morning when there is no school in the area. Even more eerie when you hear children screaming, laughing and playing and then nothing after the bell. The wind must have been blowing in my direction that day too, when I heard it. Do schools use hand-bells nowadays? I thought they were all on the electric alarm bells now. What makes it even more eerie, is that Aquatom mansion is built on the site of an old school. Oooh…

I’ve had a quick look at ‘air raid siren’ on Wikipedia. I was taken to the page for ‘Civil Defense Siren’ and read that the alarm is used as an air raid siren, tornado siren, tsunami siren, fire siren/whistle, flood siren, weather siren, time/curfew siren, or other outdoor warning siren. I think the only reasons why it could be used now, apart from the test, is possibly the fire and flood warning, but every Monday at 10am indicates, thankfully, that it is a test. Or that we may have high tide every week – some parts of the town are prone to flooding. Due to the bizarre weather we experienced toward the end of last year (2010 sounds so old news now, doesn’t it?), the tornado siren could be included now, but it looks nice and still outside. Well, apart from the wind that blew the siren in my direction in the first place. Wind. Eek.

On the subject of air raids, a memory has just popped into my head. I remember looking out of the window in work one day, when a Stealth Bomber flew past, it looked just beyond the building opposite. That wasn’t something we saw every day in the office, and a couple of colleagues were commenting on it. I can’t be one hundred per cent sure, but it may have been on a Monday, at 10am. Oh ‘eck…