I, Prepper

It’s been months since I posted here. A lot has happened in the world, almost all of it without requiring a comment from me. The world is getting on with it sans my disapproval.

But I’m back, in the first chills of oncoming winter, and the trigger for my writing is, just as it was the last time, my weekly delivery from Sainsburys.

They were early today and caught me on the hop getting from the shower to appearing as a fully dressed and alert householder. Still I pulled my trousers on and got into my slippers by the time the deliveryman arrived outside my front door.

I was straining my back getting the weekly supply run out of his hands and into mine when he asked me if the notable numbers of tins of soup and the couple of tins of corned beef were ‘regular tins or Doomsday tins’. I allowed that most of it was my regular order but that I was topping up the Doomsday tins because when it got towards Saturday I sometimes raided the Doomsday cupboard for my evening meal. I’d made corned beef hash on Friday and I was topping up.

I hadn’t previously known that was the name for that cupboard but I suppose the delivery drivers are going to be the ones to notice the tendency towards stocking up with, as mine put it, “Doomsday tins and Doomsday water”.Thus does the English Language adapt and spread.

I had always assumed that preparations for Doomsday were futile. I had always assumed that living, as I do, just a few miles from RAF Strike Command (to the north of the town) I was fated to a rapid vapourising come the Wrath of the Kremlin descending on the UK. (Not according to the target lists that some people are publishing on the Internet: I feel it to be an insult to our civic pride of High Wycombe. Not even worth a single MIRV warhead? Cha!)

But it seems that the twenty-first century has brought about a doomsday not predicted in the lurid films and novels of my youth. Instead of a rain of nuclear fire we have to worry about hiccups in the supply chain. About sabotage via spotty Russian youths at keyboards. Or presumably Chinese, Iranian or just mercenary spotty youths with pale skins unexposed to sunlight (you’re a fine one to talk, Michael, with your need for a Vitamin D a day), excellent keyboard skills but no social skills at all, at all.

That’s the sort of apocalypse the British imagination can handle! A derth of Weetabix? No running water in the whole Thames Valley? We can handle that sort of thing (or at least we think we can) with a lot of tutting, a smidgeon of Blitz Spirit and a whole shedload of British Grit. “Keep buggering on!” And other Churchilian quotations.

I do hope it doesn’t get any worse than that. Looking back now, the COVID emergency was good practice. Doubtless future historians will look upon the event as a blessing in disguise the way the history books in my youth looked at the Great Fire Of London as a useful purgative for the medieval tenements which had bred the Great Plague of London. Time, especially centuries of it, lends charm to the view.

I’ve even bought an emergency medical kit and a windup radio. It occurs to me that I am being very accepting of the current advice beng given by HM Government. My younger self would be a lot more cynical, as well as being too poor to afford to stockpile cans and bottles of water. Perhaps it’s because the current threats fit in with my current miserable worldview.