A week, but we do have a pantry of tins and dry goods that might see us for a month.
If the society somehow breaks down, the first place we'll escape to is my mum's place. It's a farmhouse with two old priest holes. Her pantry and livestock can last us at least a year. The kits from my school archery / fencing / shooting / kendo days are still at her house, so we will use those. I'll need to practise, though, as it's been decades since I last touched those.
There's an old WWII bunker somewhere in the woods behind her house. Granted, it stinks, but we can clear it up. I'll get the kids to do it. The bunker will be our last-resort place in case Mum's house gets overrun.
So what "rainy day" stuff did your grandparents have to enable them to better survive the disasters you list?
They had food enough to last them longer than a few days. They grew and stored food, They never wasted food like we do now. They were used to going without heating and many of the things we take for granted.
Opposite us are two hand pumps (in the allotments) that pump up from wells.
Me and my sons have already earmarked them for when the zombies appear.:D
Crossing open ground every day for water...? ;-)
Better to store it; it's suprising how easy it is to prepare large amounts of water for longterm storage, and it uses such small amounts of unperfumed bleach that its virtually unnoticeable. Even unadulterated, water has a quite long "shelf life"; next time you're in Tescos, check out the "best before" dates on bottled water...!
They had food enough to last them longer than a few days. They grew and stored food, They never wasted food like we do now. They were used to going without heating and many of the things we take for granted.
Most people had open fires so could find something to burn, most people also kept candles in because power cuts were normal
Yes i think people forget that its no longer any good to buy things with, its only value is if its paper burn it and hope to keep warm from the flames.
You got snowed in for weeks
The power went off for weeks. You lost your job, and benefits were very slow in coming( as many have found out)
People are having to go to food banks.
Famine, diseases. anything really
....
Setting fire to what money you have seems a strange reaction to going on benefits I'd much rather have savings to support me in that one
I always wonder if the M25 would be used as a barrier by the army to stop people getting out of London?
The simple answer is - yes.
The UK motorway network can very easily be totally isolated from the rest of the road network; just put police or Army roadblocks on every feeder lane! This was actually part of the UK Civil Defence plans for the decades of the Cold War...
1/ it helped divide the population into "segments" that couldn't move about the country - wherever they went, or tried to evacuate to, eventually they'd run into the "barrier" to further movement crated by a closed-off motorway;
2/ Isolating the motorway network from civilian traffic meant that it was 100% available for MoD traffic! Obviously, vital in the run-up to or during any war...
In all seriousness, I don't think you're a tin foil hat wearer, sweetpeanut. I grew up in earthquake territory as well as in the shadow of a massive volcano, and we were always reminded by the local authorities to keep emergency supplies on hand. I don't know why I've grown so complacent.
Maybe I've read The Stand too many times, because in the event of an emergency I reckon finding a bicycle and heading to Nebraska would be my first instinct!
Indeed. If Armageddon ever came money would be worthless.
I posted this advice some years ago now; I've just found it again, and I've posted up up, because the bit in bold at the bottom applies...what you do if you find yourself all alone, with no preparations of any kind made, and you're in a hostile or empty environment...
First port of call is a large farmhouse. I'd check a major police station, and would love to produce a nice Glock pistol or H&K submachinegun....but the police will have all been out armed protecting strategic assets, stores, depots, managing refugees etc. - and dropped in their tracks. So if I haven't found one still attached to a blue-dressed corpse in the street I'm not going to.
So - a shotgun....or yes, hit a country sports shop and get hold of one. A straight-backed beltknife like a large Bowie, and a skinning knife for anything I can ever manage to bring down. Cartridges of birdshot, buckshot - and those big plastic slugs for bringing down foxes and sheepworrying dogs. And a bagful of big solid fishing weights. Some quiet day I'll want to melt them down and try and make manshot...
Accomodation. Not a big house, no. One just big enough, with windowless outbuildings, say, a double garage or stableblock. BUT - the house needs to be invisible from the nearest road, and you do something to block the driveway or lane. In woods would be good.
A well is essential. Bottled water is fine but it needs to be found and moved. Hit all the camping shops you can find and clean THEM out of anything useful, but especially halazone water purification tablets (taste yuck!) then the local Boots' for tabletop water filter jugs LMAO.
Packaged and longlife foods. Camping dehydrated catfood LOL, tinned food, freezedried. Flour, dried yeast. A generator and fuel - but preferably a gas camping stove ring for convenience. Generators can be NOISY...
DON'T FORAGE FROM THE NEAREST VILLAGES OR TOWNS. Go a few miles further while the roads are passable. Anyone malicious out there after a few months, and if they see signs of foraging they'll KNOW there's someome about sitting on a big pile of useful stuff!!! So surround your home with a "fallow zone" that looks unlived in - gives you an edge.
Medicines. Antibiotics of all kinds as long as their shelf life lasts, and nothing you know you're allergic too. You'll kill yourself as dead trying to pull a tooth on top of an abcess WITHOUT treating the abcess first, as someone shooting you through the heart...Bleach. All you can find. And use it; there's going to be a LOT of diseases about for a few years.
Clothing. Forget the jeans NOW. Denim wears fast when worn every day, and isn't warm in winter. Decent moleskin, waxed cotton - it's actually proof against shotgun pellets at a distance. And camoflage, summer and winter. Lay in BIGGER than normal sizes so you can wear lots of layers for heat, not single layers of thick clothing; layers are warm. remember - in autumn, winter and early spring, the ONLY artifical heat you'll have is in your own home. No warm supermarkets or pubs. After a few months EVERY house, shop and building will be cold and getting damp. Hey, it's BRITAIN...
GOOD footwear. Really good leather boots. No fancy nubuck or anything, you can pick up longlife real leather stuff in the same outdoors shops. With HIGH ankle support. A broken or turned ankle far from home will leave you as vulnerable as getting kneecapped.
Forget trying to farm animals. Untill you KNOW your area - it's far too obvious. Ditto cultivating veggies until you know that your plot can't be seen from the road. Learn your subject or grow simple. Until you KNOW you can - live on tinned goods....and clean any chemists and supermarket out of vitamin supplements of all types.
After that - EXPLORE YOUR AREA, KNOW your area, know it so well you'll know when someone has moved something out of place for a five mile radius. Know if so well YOU see THEM before they see you - and have time to work out their intentions.
Once you work out that it's your paranoia that has kept you alive - THEN you apply that same paranoia to other people and make contact IF you find them. Approach from the opposite direction from where YOU live, that sort of thing. After X amount of time, don't worry....they'll be applying exactly the same life lessons to YOU....
Finally....
For those that know the reference...."Harvey's Blue Van"... .;-);-);-)
Spices of ALL sorts. Tea. Coffee. Sugars. Salt. Store it ALL in sealed containers. Rolling tobacco first, then cigarettes. Quality spirits and liquers....
"Trade goods" - very soon, the offlicence shelves will be empty, and tinned Spam will taste very bland...for other people. Imagine what a heavy smoker will do or trade after a year of cravings. Or a caffeine addict.
And condoms. Put by a LARGE quantity of those. Noone who has managed to survive in such a world will want to be burdened with babies until they are very very sure of their survival prospects...
There will very soon be other currencies than money...
In all seriousness, I don't think you're a tin foil hat wearer, sweetpeanut. I grew up in earthquake territory as well as in the shadow of a massive volcano, and we were always reminded by the local authorities to keep emergency supplies on hand. I don't know why I've grown so complacent.
Maybe I've read The Stand too many times, because in the event of an emergency I reckon finding a bicycle and heading to Nebraska would be my first instinct!
I love that book!
Maybe growing up in the 70s with all the strikes and power cuts just made me more aware of the need to put things by for a "rainy" day.
Last time I rode a bike after a few years of driving I got a sore backside. So its shanks pony for me if I had to get somewhere without a car.
A fat person could just live off own their reserves.
If only! The old saw used to be - you can live for three weeks without food, but only three days without water...
The problem is that it's only fat; it has to be used by the body...burned up...in the correct proportion with carbs and protein. The fattest man in the world would still die after three weeks without carbs or protein to burn up alongside/with the body fat. That's why in some diets you consume a controlled amount of the other two - but as little fat in the diet as possible...to make your body use its "own" fat with the carbs and protein.
The OTHER side of the equation is...you can consume too much overly-lean meats like rabbit and venison. You need to consume fats along with them in some form...
In the first winter in the New World, the Mayflower Settlers were hampered both by disease and starvation; they had very little success hunting for food, and there were many deaths due to starvation. Eventually, when they were approached during the winter by the local Native Americans, the Settlers put out the few goods they had enough of as trade...
...and the local Indians, short of fats in their diet, sat down and ate the Settlers' butter like ice cream!
I posted this advice some years ago now; I've just found it again, and I've posted up up, because the bit in bold at the bottom applies...what you do if you find yourself all alone, with no preparations of any kind made, and you're in a hostile or empty environment...
You've clearly spent far too long thinking about this.
You've clearly spent far too long thinking about this.
Thirty years?
I first read Beneath The City Streets when I was twenty, and a lot of CND-published material on UK Civil Defence plans....very nice of them to publish it all! And there's a LOT of decent end-of-the-world fiction and scifi out there, The Stand is just one of dozens if not hundreds. And some of them are absolutely brilliant, and classics of the genre well worth reading if only for entertainment. Not to mention films, telly series etc...
And there's a suprising amount of FEMA material online now.
Lets get past the zombie nonsense. (Although if anything really big kicked off, those who didn't prepare for anything would be after your food to feed their own family.)
I'm talking about unusual weather, shops would run out of food within a day. look how people act as soon as snow is predicted, shelves are empty within hours. We would have power cuts sometimes for days on end.
I would rather not do any of that and always have food and other supplies just in case.
Surely its only common sense? Or are we so arrogant these days that we just think "it will never happen" Our grandparents knew it could and does happen and so were prepared for it.
I'm a optimist, but still know things can and do go badly wrong at times.
What do you actually mean by that bit in bold sweetpeanut?
What do you actually mean by that bit in bold sweetpeanut?
War, outbreaks of flu, losing their jobs, financial crash, bad weather. I think we have been very lucky over the years but it doesn't mean we are safe from nothing ever happening.
War, outbreaks of flu, losing their jobs, financial crash, bad weather. I think we have been very lucky over the years but it doesn't mean we are safe from nothing ever happening.
As I noted before, it often just looked as if they were "preppers" - that was the lifestyle of the time. Food coming in its staple and basic ingredients, people preserving foods themselves etc. That's just how things were done two generations ago.
People couldn't "prepare" for financial crash....that's why it wiped them out; for decades after 1929/30, people didn't trust the banks, and kept their savings often literally "under the bed"...THEN the Suez Crisis saw the huge devaluation in the value of the £, and what they had saved up in hard cash was halved in value overnight
Ditto for loosing your job; that's WHY unemployment benefit became such a cause worth fighting for in the early 20th century. ALL you could do was save for a rainy day - but circumstances way out of your control could wipe it out in hours. So a regular benefit income became essential.
War....there was no real preparation for war by individuals in the first half of the 20th century; as early as WWI people were introduced to rationing, though it hit harder in WWII. They KNEW they'd have the essentials made available to them...they certainly couldn't stock up enough for several years of war... What they became good at wasn't preparing - it was in making do as it happened.
Outbreaks of flu...? There was no preparation for that, certainly not the flus like the Pandemic of 1918-19. In certain countries, like France, they were better off for nursing facilities than elsewhere that was hit by the Flu...all they did was send the thousands of longterm WWI hospital casualties home, and opened up the veterans' hospitals that had been used for nursing gas casualties to flu casualties instead!
But by its very nature, there's nothing that anyone CAN do to prepare for a pandemic of an illness or disease with no cure or vaccine; all you can do is prepare for the environment afterwards.
War, outbreaks of flu, losing their jobs, financial crash, bad weather. I think we have been very lucky over the years but it doesn't mean we are safe from nothing ever happening.
Bruce Willis will save us from Armageddon.
Sometimes things are out of our control.
We live with war now, we live in times with fatal disease outbreaks, people lose their jobs daily, monsoons/hurricanes/tsunamis happen all over the world.
Here in the UK we are lucky that the majority of the above does not affect most of us.
I would live off the land and survive as best I could if the world all went tits up.
Comments
Can I come with you?
I can pluck a chicken.
They had food enough to last them longer than a few days. They grew and stored food, They never wasted food like we do now. They were used to going without heating and many of the things we take for granted.
Indeed. If Armageddon ever came money would be worthless.
I suppose if I was creative with cooking there is probably 2 weeks worth of food in the house but a lot of that would be rice and frozen veg.
Crossing open ground every day for water...? ;-)
Better to store it; it's suprising how easy it is to prepare large amounts of water for longterm storage, and it uses such small amounts of unperfumed bleach that its virtually unnoticeable. Even unadulterated, water has a quite long "shelf life"; next time you're in Tescos, check out the "best before" dates on bottled water...!
Most people had open fires so could find something to burn, most people also kept candles in because power cuts were normal
The OP suggested a variety of disasters Setting fire to what money you have seems a strange reaction to going on benefits
The simple answer is - yes.
The UK motorway network can very easily be totally isolated from the rest of the road network; just put police or Army roadblocks on every feeder lane!
1/ it helped divide the population into "segments" that couldn't move about the country - wherever they went, or tried to evacuate to, eventually they'd run into the "barrier" to further movement crated by a closed-off motorway;
2/ Isolating the motorway network from civilian traffic meant that it was 100% available for MoD traffic! Obviously, vital in the run-up to or during any war...
See Peter Laurie's Beneath The City Streets.
Who ever holds the water, has the fountain of life.
Maybe I've read The Stand too many times, because in the event of an emergency I reckon finding a bicycle and heading to Nebraska would be my first instinct!
Haha glad im not the only one thinking that! Id last a couple of months if i still had bills to pay. A zombie apocalypse would suit me better
Trouble with open fires were they only warmed the one room and you dreaded leaving that room.
Don't most people keep candles in case of power cuts?
I posted this advice some years ago now; I've just found it again, and I've posted up up, because the bit in bold at the bottom applies...what you do if you find yourself all alone, with no preparations of any kind made, and you're in a hostile or empty environment...
There will very soon be other currencies than money...
In many countries, yes; in the UK however, it tends to drop out of the sky like manna from Heaven...
I love that book!
Maybe growing up in the 70s with all the strikes and power cuts just made me more aware of the need to put things by for a "rainy" day.
Last time I rode a bike after a few years of driving I got a sore backside. So its shanks pony for me if I had to get somewhere without a car.
If only! The old saw used to be - you can live for three weeks without food, but only three days without water...
The problem is that it's only fat; it has to be used by the body...burned up...in the correct proportion with carbs and protein. The fattest man in the world would still die after three weeks without carbs or protein to burn up alongside/with the body fat. That's why in some diets you consume a controlled amount of the other two - but as little fat in the diet as possible...to make your body use its "own" fat with the carbs and protein.
The OTHER side of the equation is...you can consume too much overly-lean meats like rabbit and venison. You need to consume fats along with them in some form...
In the first winter in the New World, the Mayflower Settlers were hampered both by disease and starvation; they had very little success hunting for food, and there were many deaths due to starvation. Eventually, when they were approached during the winter by the local Native Americans, the Settlers put out the few goods they had enough of as trade...
...and the local Indians, short of fats in their diet, sat down and ate the Settlers' butter like ice cream!
You've clearly spent far too long thinking about this.
Thirty years?
I first read Beneath The City Streets when I was twenty, and a lot of CND-published material on UK Civil Defence plans....very nice of them to publish it all! And there's a LOT of decent end-of-the-world fiction and scifi out there, The Stand is just one of dozens if not hundreds. And some of them are absolutely brilliant, and classics of the genre well worth reading if only for entertainment. Not to mention films, telly series etc...
And there's a suprising amount of FEMA material online now.
What do you actually mean by that bit in bold sweetpeanut?
My equivalent would be Lucifer's Hammer ;-)
War, outbreaks of flu, losing their jobs, financial crash, bad weather. I think we have been very lucky over the years but it doesn't mean we are safe from nothing ever happening.
Of course. In fact, I'd beg you to join us if you know how to handle two moody teenagers.
It's probably best if I die soon so the more resourceful people can inherit what's left of the earth
As I noted before, it often just looked as if they were "preppers" - that was the lifestyle of the time. Food coming in its staple and basic ingredients, people preserving foods themselves etc. That's just how things were done two generations ago.
People couldn't "prepare" for financial crash....that's why it wiped them out; for decades after 1929/30, people didn't trust the banks, and kept their savings often literally "under the bed"...THEN the Suez Crisis saw the huge devaluation in the value of the £, and what they had saved up in hard cash was halved in value overnight
Ditto for loosing your job; that's WHY unemployment benefit became such a cause worth fighting for in the early 20th century. ALL you could do was save for a rainy day - but circumstances way out of your control could wipe it out in hours. So a regular benefit income became essential.
War....there was no real preparation for war by individuals in the first half of the 20th century; as early as WWI people were introduced to rationing, though it hit harder in WWII. They KNEW they'd have the essentials made available to them...they certainly couldn't stock up enough for several years of war... What they became good at wasn't preparing - it was in making do as it happened.
Outbreaks of flu...? There was no preparation for that, certainly not the flus like the Pandemic of 1918-19. In certain countries, like France, they were better off for nursing facilities than elsewhere that was hit by the Flu...all they did was send the thousands of longterm WWI hospital casualties home, and opened up the veterans' hospitals that had been used for nursing gas casualties to flu casualties instead!
But by its very nature, there's nothing that anyone CAN do to prepare for a pandemic of an illness or disease with no cure or vaccine; all you can do is prepare for the environment afterwards.
Bruce Willis will save us from Armageddon.
Sometimes things are out of our control.
We live with war now, we live in times with fatal disease outbreaks, people lose their jobs daily, monsoons/hurricanes/tsunamis happen all over the world.
Here in the UK we are lucky that the majority of the above does not affect most of us.
I would live off the land and survive as best I could if the world all went tits up.