I’m not old enough to be your father. My memories of the ’70s aren’t terribly clear … I was a child … but they’re clear enough that I remember all the things I mentioned because daily/nightly powercuts, streets full of uncollected rubbish, people going berserk during the months-long sugar shortages … they stick in your memory.
And having lived through the first flush of East Germans moving to the West in ‘89/’90 and seen queues at the bakeries and all the bread gone by 09:00 … when, under normal circumstances, there’s more than enough bread for everyone all day long … because they were used to getting everything they could as early as they could and, since there wasn’t much, not being able to afford to care if others starved as a result — if you allowed yourself to have empathy and let someone else have the last loaf of bread on the shelf, your family was going hungry until the next time there was bread in the shops (a day later? two? three?), because there wasn’t any in any of the other shops.
That’s the thing, you see: your idea that things have been getting better for the last hundred years is entirely down to where you’ve been fortunate enough to live.
I was in Berlin the night the Wall came down. In the coming days, weeks, months, I spent time on the other side — it had barely been rebuilt since the war (there were vast areas of buildings that, over forty years later, were just shells).
I went over to Russia in 1990 … saw the hospitals there — we had better equipped and more hygienic slaughterhouse here than the hospitals I saw there.
A friend of mine was in St Petersburg in ‘94/95. They didn’t have sewers … people threw their chamberpots into the street like here in the West in the 1500s. He saw a human head getting kicked around by people at his local market — the Brownian Motion of people just knocking it out of their way as they went about their business meant that, a week later, he saw the same head on the other side of town.
Your idea of the arc of civilisation is based upon a post WWII West. You should talk to my friend who lived in Ethiopia as child. The one who lived in Russia as a child. Or the ones who were in Chile in the 1980s. Or Rwanda. The ones in Mexico in the 2000s. Civilisation is fragile. More fragile than people here realise..
We just saw what happens when people panic: there are artificial shortages even when there aren’t any real ones, because the supply chains can’t keep up.
What do you think’s gonna happen when the supply chains just plain break down and we’re living, to all intents and purposes, in pre-’89 East Germany or, worse yet, Poland or Russia? Remember, in Berlin today, you can’t guarantee availability of items from one day to the next even with the supply chains working perfectly … but the situation there is that there’s graceful degradation (you can’t get that brand … or maybe not that item … but you can get something similar). What’s it gonna be like when there’s no graceful degradation just catastrophic failure — nothing in, nothing out, because there’s no agreement on what’s allowed in or out?
The knock-on effects could last months … we’ve no way of knowing.
If I were you, I’d start listening to your parents. You don’t wanna find yourself unable to buy food/toilet paper/first aid items in the midst of a No Deal Brexit and global pandemic. We’re not Weimar Germany by a long stretch, but you could find that, even when you can find stuff on the shop shelves, you can’t afford as much as you’re used to. And, if you’re all electric, you could find those powercuts very hungrymaking.
Get a couple of torches — if you can’t get windup ones, get a lot of batteries too. Get a couple of lanterns (windup or battery). If you don’t have gas for cooking, get yourself a small camping gas cooker. You may not need them but it never hurts to have them, just in case; we’ve had a couple of power cuts around my way the last year or so and it made me aware how complacent I’ve become the last forty years.
It doesn’t take Brexit or a global pandemic to leave you feeling foolish as you stumble about in the dark wishing you knew if you even had a torch, never mind where it might be, and wondering what the hell you’re going to do about food because you can’t cook … just a simple powercut. Now imagine regular powercuts and food shortages with no idea when things are going back to normal.
You don’t need a nuclear bunker’s worth of supplies … a month’s worth will do: tinned foods, pasta, rice, UHT milk. They last a long time, so, if everything goes smoothly, they won’t go to waste: you always find yourself short of one of them at some point and if you don’t live in London zones 1, 2 or central Zone 3, with 24x7 shopping, they can save the day even without a 22:00/10pm curfew.
If things start to look bad later, see what you can get your hands on that could contribute to the cost of passage to Peru (or somewhere like that). Come the end of the World, you wanna be somewhere where, ideally, both coffee and cocoa grow naturally, but, if not both, definitely cocoa in any event — because, everywhere else, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy women … with PMT and no chocolate fix.
