How to dig and defend a tunnel

Team effort is vital when you are in a hole, says environment activist Muppet Dave

You want the entrance to be somewhere hard for the men in black, or the Forces of Darkness as we call them, to storm. On a slope is good. We dig round-the-clock and, for every digger, three people bucket-out behind. For lighting, we use a car battery and fairy lights. Soft earth needs more shoring. When a tunnel is about six foot long, square it off, measure it up, hammer wooden supports into the wall and cut a piece of board for the roof - old doors are good. If a tunnel is exceptionally well-shored, the men in black just send in the bailiffs to chip you out of your concrete lock-ons. So we like our shoring slightly dodgy. But not too dodgy. This is non-violent direct action and the last thing we want is a casualty. The tunnel at Manchester Airport is like an underground helter-skelter - a straight tunnel is no good as we found at Fairmile: the men in black shored Big Mama up in a day. Fresh air is dragged in via rigid plastic piping with a computer fan on the end run by a car battery. We turn off the fans during eviction because the nice men in black pump oxygen down to us. During eviction, water bottles become wee bottles. Other things we do in carrier bags, checking for holes first, of course!

Muppet Dave is currently involved in the protest against the proposed runway at Manchester Airport. His pamphlet, 'Lessons from Big Mama', will soon be published on the Internet