It’s been three weeks since the government advisory urging us to start stockpiling in case of emergency – how’s your prep coming along? The Prepare campaign, backed by Wes Streeting, who one imagines gliding through the apocalypse, quiff undisturbed, listed nine essential items, among them wet wipes, first-aid kits and batteries. The World Health Organization, meanwhile, suggests budgeting for 15 litres of water per person per day, so a family of four will need to store upwards of 180 litres to cover the recommended period of three days. The chances of this actually happening seem to me, intuitively, to be considerably lower than the disaster they’re supposed to forestall. But hope springs, so let’s see.
The first step towards stockpiling is stocktaking. This is where I’m at: one mega-torch (uncharged), which I bought in prepper mode after surviving the terrifying New York blackout of 2019 when for about an hour we couldn’t charge our phones; lots of very large sticking plasters and a handful of small round ones, the normal sizes having long been used up; two cans of tuna, which will go down to one after lunch; two litres of sparkling water, so for the first hour or so after a nuclear strike, assuming it happens this afternoon, we’ll at least be able to enjoy some bubbles; and three OxyContin saved from my c-section almost 12 years ago, which are probably less powerful than homeopathy at this point but I retain a vague hope I can use for barter when money breaks down.
In other words, I’m not really prepared and the biggest deficit in my unpreparedness is, evidently, my attitude. On the evidence of what appeared to be a collective shrug, recently, when we were informed of the threats posed by AI, it’s an attitude problem that’s widely shared. It’s not that we don’t care, perhaps, but that it is hard to know what to do. By which I mean, it’s hard to know what to do that doesn’t involve giving over precious closet space to 40 two-litre bottles of water or disrupting our thought patterns to accommodate large, uncomfortable truths.
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In other words, if this is a collective failure of imagination, then what’s needed is some rigorous thought experiments that address our inability to imagine the worst. It’s wild that this should be necessary six years after a global pandemic, but of course, if there’s one thing to be said about humankind, it’s our ability to go scorched earth on recent trauma and pretend like nothing ever happened. This is called resilience – and there are, I’m sure, good evolutionary reasons for it, yet in this case it’s unhelpful. From scratch, then, we must develop what the government calls “household resilience”, which in my house means learning not to go into meltdown when someone can’t find their favourite hoodie or we run out of Nutella, or the Russians aim a missile towards our area.
With this in mind, I would recommend browsing something called the local resilience forum, made up of regional lists of potential threats starting with “nuclear attack by a state on the UK mainland”, working down through pandemics, biblical droughts, floods, and the collapse of the National Grid, all the way to the threat posed by “space weather”. It’s very When the Wind Blows, and if it’s hard to square with real world scenarios, I suspect it’s because when you put something in local government language and stick it in a table, any sense of threat collapses beneath the sheer weight of boredom.
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For real imaginative engagement, we must turn to the fiction writers. The scene I go to in my head is the opening pages of Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, in which a character called Jeevan, tipped off by a doctor friend that a pandemic is coming that will kill 99% of the world’s population, runs to a supermarket, shackles seven big shopping carts together and buys enough food and water to barricade himself in his apartment for 58 days, until the first panic has passed.
So, as long as Tesco is open and I can beat the rush, perhaps things will work out just fine? I know there are some walnuts at the back of the cupboard. We could take the batteries out of the remote to use in the torch. Per The Day After Tomorrow, I have plenty of books for firewood, and worst-case scenario, can wear the cats for extra warmth. And while water is a problem, I think about that couple who survived in a tiny boat in the middle of the Pacific for 118 days, and imagine we will figure it out. I can catch the drips from the freezer as it defrosts and suck the gel from the aloe vera. See? Already thinking like a survivor. We’ve got this!
