did anyone see the post on Facebook? Bit long but funny
THE GOVERNMENT HAS JUST DISCOVERED THE CUPBOARD UNDER THE STAIRS
Britain is apparently being encouraged to keep a few emergency supplies at home in case the weather turns feral, the power goes off, the banking system coughs up a lung or somebody hostile decides to prod the national infrastructure with a very expensive stick.
Fair enough. Sensible advice.
What made me laugh is that basic household competence has now been repackaged as “preparedness”, as though some bright spark in Whitehall has just cracked a problem that generations before us somehow missed.
Gen X did not need a campaign. We had mothers.
More specifically, we had mothers who could turn a cupboard under the stairs into a logistical reserve capable of sustaining a family through a snowstorm, a miners’ strike, three power cuts and the opening stages of World War Three.
THE ORIGINAL STRATEGIC FOOD RESERVE
There was no system. Nothing was labelled. Nobody had vacuum-sealed dehydrated meals stacked in matching boxes next to a solar generator and a tactical water filter.
There were tins.
Loads of fucking tins.
Beans because they were on offer. Peaches in syrup because apparently every emergency required peaches. Corned beef, soup, rice pudding, evaporated milk and at least one mystery tin whose label had faded to the point where opening it became less like lunch and more like archaeology.
Throwing anything away was out of the question. A tin could have travelled through three house moves, two recessions and the entire Thatcher administration, but unless it had physically swollen into the shape of a hand grenade it was still “perfectly good”.
Then, sitting among the civilian rations, was the Fray Bentos pie.
I’m still not convinced those things were designed by a food company. That tin was closer to armour plating than packaging and getting into one required grip strength, patience and a realistic acceptance that A&E might feature later in the evening.
Had the Warsaw Pact reached Newport in the 1980s, there was no need to panic. Half the women in South Wales could have disabled a T-72 by throwing steak and kidney pies at the tracks while shouting that tea would be ready at six.
That was national defence done properly.
THE EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT WAS EQUALLY ADVANCED
Every house had a torch, although “working torch” would be pushing the definition.
It would come out of a drawer during a power cut, flicker weakly for two seconds and then require the standard maintenance procedure, which involved hitting it repeatedly against the palm while swearing at it.
Naturally, the same drawer contained enough batteries to power a small submarine, but none of them fitted the fucking torch.
There were candles as well, usually ancient things left over from the last outage, a camping trip or some distant Christmas nobody could remember. The matches had been put somewhere safe, which in every British household meant somewhere so secure they would never be seen again.
Nobody needed an emergency app to explain the procedure.
Somebody found the candles, somebody checked whether the neighbours’ lights were off and somebody else shouted, “DON’T OPEN THE FREEZER,” as though the contents were undergoing open-heart surgery.
Once the entire street was confirmed dark, the diagnosis was complete. The National Grid had fucked it, Dad hadn’t.
Everyone carried on.
WHEN THE WATER WENT OFF, NATO WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD
A water outage turned an ordinary family home into a command post within minutes.
The kettle became a strategic reserve. Baths were cancelled. Cups of tea required authorisation. Toilet flushing moved from a basic human function to something approaching an operational decision.
There was always some poor bastard standing outside the bathroom asking, “Do you really need to flush that?”
Few moments in life humble a person faster than having to justify their bowel movement to the household logistics officer.
Somebody would inevitably suggest filling the saucepans, usually several minutes after the taps had already stopped working, because British emergency planning has always included shutting the stable door after the horse has fucked off down the M4.
Even so, everybody managed.
No helpline. No group chat. No neighbourhood Facebook post beginning, “Does anyone know what’s happening hun?”
The water was off. It would come back on. In the meantime, nobody wasted the kettle.
BANKING OUTAGE? MAM HAD THAT COVERED AS WELL
The modern warning about keeping a bit of cash around makes perfect sense, but it is hardly revolutionary.
Women of my mother’s generation operated a banking system that would have confused HM Treasury.
There might be twenty quid in an old purse, a tenner folded inside a tea caddy, loose change in a jar heavy enough to be used as a murder weapon and another note hidden somewhere that would eventually be discovered by whoever cleared the house thirty years later.
This was not called “financial resilience”.
It was called having a few quid put by because banks were not regarded as magical institutions incapable of fucking things up.
If the card machines stopped working, nobody stood outside Tesco staring at a dead iPhone like civilisation had ended. Cash appeared from somewhere, the shopping got paid for and life moved on.
CYBER-ATTACKS HAVE NOTHING ON DIAL-UP
The modern threat that really tickles me is cyber disruption, because Gen X and the last feral millennials were trained for that shit before anybody knew what cyber resilience meant.
Early internet was basically a controlled infrastructure failure offered as a subscription service.
First came the modem noise, which sounded like a fax machine being sexually assaulted by R2-D2 inside a skip. Then came the wait while a web page loaded at roughly the speed of continental drift.
A single photograph could take long enough to make a cup of tea, eat a biscuit and reconsider whether seeing it was worth the effort.
The entire operation depended on one thing: nobody touching the telephone.
This instruction would be announced clearly to the household. It would be repeated. Threats would occasionally be added for emphasis.
Then, forty minutes later, just as the page was almost finished loading, somebody upstairs would pick up the extension and say, “Hello?”
The modem would scream, the connection would die and one family member would immediately begin planning a murder.
That was our cyber incident response procedure.
No compensation claim followed. Nobody demanded a public inquiry. Another attempt was made later once everyone had been warned that touching the fucking phone would result in consequences.
THE LAST FERAL MILLENNIALS QUALIFY TOO
Late millennials caught enough of this world to remember life before every simple task required an app, a login, a QR code and permission to send twelve notifications a day.
Meeting friends involved choosing a place and a time in advance, then turning up.
There was no live location tracking. Nobody watched a blue dot move across a map like GCHQ monitoring a hostile submarine. If Dave said he would be outside Woolworths at seven, there was a reasonable expectation that Dave would be outside Woolworths at seven.
If Dave was late, there were two available technologies.
Waiting and swearing.
Both had excellent battery life.
Television finished as well. Actually finished.
At some point the national anthem played, the picture disappeared and the entire country was effectively told that entertainment was over and everybody should piss off to bed.
Try explaining that to somebody raised on infinite scroll.
Streaming going down for twenty minutes now causes people to start checking whether civilisation has collapsed. Back then four television channels simply stopped broadcasting and the country somehow staggered through until breakfast.
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, INCONVENIENCE BECAME AN EMERGENCY
That, for me, is the funny bit.
The advice itself is sensible. Keeping a bit of food, some water, a working torch, batteries, basic first aid, a power bank and a few quid in cash is not paranoia. It is simply accepting that systems sometimes fail.
Previous generations understood that without needing to turn it into a lifestyle.
They also understood something modern life seems increasingly determined to erase: not every inconvenience is a catastrophe.
The power might go off. The water might stop. The shop might be closed. The bank might have a problem. The internet might disappear for a while.
Life carried on because people expected occasionally to have to cope.
Plenty about the old days was crap and deserved to disappear, so I’m not about to start pretending 1983 was some golden age because we had candles and tinned peaches.
But the ability to deal with a few hours of mild chaos without treating it like the fall of Rome was probably worth keeping.
So yes, stock the cupboard.
Keep a torch that actually fucking works.
Have some cash around.
Know where the stopcock is.
And somewhere at the back, for true national security, keep a Fray Bentos pie.
If things go really badly, it can feed the family.
If things go catastrophically badly, it can stop a tank.