When I wrote A Sensible Prepping Guide earlier this year, the theme that ran through the book was the need to prepare for life's little vicissitudes by planning ahead. That does not mean investing in a tinfoil hat and fantasising about the end of civilisation as we know it, rather it just means being aware of the stones that life tends to hurl at us and doing our best to avoid them.
In winter it gets cold, and sometimes when the thaw arrives the water pipes tend to burst, so keeping a couple of gallons of water in a cupboard makes sense to me. Similarly, the just in time system of distribution will tend to fall down in extreme weather conditions so having a pantry that is stocked with a month's worth of dry and canned foodstuffs is also a sensible way to live.
What you can't do is deal with an emergency on the hoof. Well, you can try, but it will probably end in tears or a great deal of hard work. It's being reported that shops in many parts of the country have sold out of their entire supply of electric fans and given the tropical weather that we are enjoying this year that is hardly a surprise. What is a surprise is that seemingly everyone is trying to buy their fans now, an attitude that I find completely ludicrous.
I bought my nice, 14" table fan in the late autumn of 2011. It was put in storage and every year in about May it gets hauled out and plugged in. Most years I only use it for a few days, but this year it has been running pretty much all the time. Come October it will go back into storage for another year, and that's the way to do it. My bedroom is kept cool with a fan heater that has a cold setting and that keeps the bedroom nice and airy by the way.
So the key to getting by is to make sensible plans for the future. It is not to start panicking as the readers of the Guardian are doing by worrying that food will no longer arrive in the country when we leave the European Union next year. Even if you are worried about a new version of Napoleon's Continental Blockade taking the Guardian's wanky, panicky advice is most certainly not a good idea and neither is reading the insane below the line comments from the paper's sexually self-sufficient readers.
So relax, enjoy the nice weather and if like me you don't really trust today's government or its system not to cock things up, then create a pantry for yourself with non-perishable foodstuffs that you enjoy eating and rotate them through the year, restocking as your supply gets low.
Live a sensible life, in other words, and stop believing anything you read in the Guardian.
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