Preparedness in the UK - or lack of

Agree with this. A large proportion of the British public seems to have delegated any responsibility for their own lives to the government.

must wander not mums wander

We need to broaden our idea of attack to include cyber attacks, which might take out parts of the energy network, water processing, food distribution etc- more likely than conventional bombing or a nuclear attack. In this situation having food that can be stored at ambient temperature and doesn't need cooking, drinking water, basic medical supplies etc would be extremely useful.

@ContentedAlpaca

If you don't live like that then you're buying it for the sake of it and then having to keep track of dates so it can be donated to someone who would want it.

It's not that hard to "keep track of dates". When I've been shopping, I put the new stuff in the cupboard behind the old stuff, so basically "rotating" to the new stuff is at the front and gets used first. So no need to keep checking for dates etc. We never buy anything that we wouldn't use on a "normal" basis - yes, some things will only get used occasionally, maybe monthly, but we never buy anything ONLY for use in an emergency.

Yes, technology has "sold" us Just In Time, which gives us false reliance on shops always having stuff, getting next day deliveries, etc. The result is that shops have no "stock rooms", and households don't have "spares" either. That's absolutely fine when things go as planned, but a sudden shock like a power cut, bad weather, or even a major motorway accident, can throw it all into chaos. Just look at last year's Co-Op and M&S computer viruses - Co-Op shops were empty for weeks afterwards as they had no "plan B" to fill their shops with stock if the computerised ordering/delivery system was down!

And this is a problem. If you don't live like that then you're buying it for the sake of it and then having to keep track of dates so it can be donated to someone who would want it.

It's a good point about fridge and frozen stuff - better to keep those shut if it's only going to be a couple of days, so then you do need more pantry stuff.

We camp so I generally have about 3 days of food in my camper for spontaneous trips. I'm sure I have a few tins, pasta and cous cous left over from last year and obviously torches, stoves etc are all together in there.

Yup, we have three cars and we have road maps in all three of them, not fully up to date, but none are decades old either. I buy them when I notice them on offer at places like "The Works" - usually those huge A-Z full country ones. I also have some local street maps for our nearest two towns and nearest city which I've had for a long time, so will be out of date, but probably 90%+ still right, obviously excluding new build estates!

When we're doing long drives, we keep a big road map in the car with us as we find them more helpful when there are motorway accidents or congestion etc as sat nav can often give some strange alternatives and we prefer to check via a map as to the sat nav alternative and also maybe alternatives of our own if we decide to take a more enjoyable "scenic" alternative rather than being stuck in nose to tail queues through random towns etc for hours. Many a time, we've decided to "sit out" a bad congestion by spending the day somewhere else en route or taking a much longer but more enjoyable alternative - sat nav's can't make those kinds of decision.

What am i preparing for?

Some people in this country will be screwed when Deliveroo is the first service to stop when the war / insurrection begins!

The uk is a tiny island, if we were nuked we’d know very little about it and wouldn’t be needing tinned carrots.

Yes, I think this is the real risk in this modern world. As said above, our area was badly affected with 4 days loss of electric during storm Desmond. Something like that affects literally everything. Buses didn't run, the train station was closed so trains just ran through without stopping, all big shops were closed, petrol stations were closed, a few small/independent shops opened to sell off their perishables per a few hours, like milk, bread, chilled/frozen food, etc but only took cash, taxis were cash only, but were scarce because they couldn't fill up with petrol so had to travel outside the area to where there hadn't been an electric outage (20-30 minutes away, so over an hour round trip!). Local radio station was down for the first day as they had to find a generator and do a lot of technical re-wiring to re-attach themselves to a working transmitter etc. No mobile network for the first day, no pulse telephone for a couple of days, even the very few street corner payphones were either not working or had huge queues!

It took a couple of days before mobile generators started to be placed around the area, it took 3 days before mobile hot foot trailers were organised by the council/electricity firms and placed around the area, likewise for the water firm to bring in vans of bottled water for people to collect.

Things take time to get in motion so at the very least, people need to be prepared to "survive" 3/4/5 days on their own resources as a minimum, which seems to be the timescale for councils/infrastructure providers to start getting things repaired or alternative provisions put in place for the bare minimum.

War will sot out youth unemployment

I think people who are not struggling for cash probably could manage on what is in the house for a couple of days, unless they call in at the supermarket daily or live on takeaway.

People who are truly being hammered by the col will likely not have pantries that are well stocked for every day use.

Things we could be just getting to the end of as the shtf would be things like washing powder and washing up liquid.

I'm not sure how we could carry supplies that would last for something that went on for months unless we developed a project of proper rotation, refilling water bottles etc.

You don't have 'the tap' if infrastructure is down, hence water being part of the recommendations for being prepared.

lol people who start these threads always know someone either in the armed forces or high up in government/royalty who told them this was happening….

for the record the armed forces have been preparing for the next world war since 1945. I expect one day someone will be right about this

Oh OP! Please go back to your day job.. or go and get a job if you don’t have one, you clearly have too much time on your hands 😂

Don't have bottled water, we have the tap! Or the water from the fridge. I do however have water purification tablets. And a wind up radio/torch/charger all in one thing.

Because the supermarket is a stones throw we are more of a grazing style of shopper though, buying as and when instead of one big bulk shop that would last several days.

Keeping in touch with an offline world is so important because of this. I know so many people who have gone all out on tech. Some of it IS avoidable.

For example, we still have a hard copy up to date A-Z map.

We've been "preparing" our entire adult lives. Not to an extreme extent, but we always have plenty of "spare" provisions in the house, bottled water, lots of tinned/packet foods, loo rolls, etc. We also have candles, a camping stove (and spare gas cylinders), a battery radio, torches (and plenty of batteries), etc.

We are both in our early sixties and remember living through the power cuts of the 70s. We're also in a small town in a rural area, and power cuts in bad weather happen every few years for a few hours. Our area was entirely without electricity for 4 days as a result of the sub station flooding during Storm Desmond, and it even knocked out the mobile network and even our local "pulse" telephone exchange, so we had no power, and no communications. We were certainly grateful to have candles and torches, and listened to local radio on the battery radio to keep updated as to timescales, extent of the blackout, etc.

We didn't need to "panic buy" at the start of Covid as we already had a good stock of loo rolls, soap, and plenty of food/drink, so we basically just shopped as normal, sitting out those couple of weeks of utter madness at first as the shops were emptied and then started back to normal as shops returned to normal.

Certainly not extreme enough to build our own nuclear bunker or create a "safe space" under the stairs, or make tinfoil hats etc., but whatever happens, we'd be relatively comfortable for a couple of weeks if chaos ensued around us, short of being obliterated by nuclear fallout or a bomb!

Sometimes, it just makes sense to not rely on our 24/7 society where people seem to have embraced "just in time" and can't cope when what they expect suddenly isn't happening.

I always wonder what preppers think they’re prepping for if war breaks out. Are they prepping operating theatres and cupboards full of medicines? So they can sew back family members’ limbs or treat terrible burns?

Or are they prepping for a long stay in the cellar: Geiger counters, shortwave radio, gallons of water, torches and astronaut food in pouches?

Let’s get serious, any attack on the UK is not going to be like Goering’s Luftwaffe dropping conventional bombs on us.

I did marvel at a prepper who once started a thread about tips for getting ready to manage the laundry after a nuclear strike.