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It’s a fairly strong indication that your US presidency is not going well when, within three months of you taking office, one of your closest allies feels the need to issue its entire population with a manual on how to survive an “imminent threat”. According to French media reports, that is what the French government is planning in the form of a 20-page booklet to go out to its citizens this summer. And while it’s intended for use against natural disaster or medical threat, we all know what we’re really talking about here. The French government would like to remind its people that, in the event of a nuclear attack, they must remember to close the doors and windows.
My dad recalls Buckinghamshire county council issuing a similar pamphlet in the 1980s, for when Russia dropped an atomic bomb on Aylesbury. My family didn’t need the advice, as it happened; in the event of the collapse of civil society, my mother’s Tupperware and plastic-bag reserves that filled an entire floor-to-ceiling cupboard would’ve pushed us to the top of any barter-based value system. Plus, for at least a week, we could have lived like kings on decades-old gravy and bolognese sauce loosened from the permafrost of the chest freezer in the garage like the body of a caveman after an ice age.
To my mother’s disappointment, this opportunity to be vindicated in the face of my dad’s occasional efforts to have a clearout never came to pass. My own history as a prepper, meanwhile, shows definite signs of generational decline. In New York, I lived through the incredible two-and-a-half-hour blackout of 2019, in which the lights of Broadway went out and people kept themselves together by singing old-timey songs and wondering if it was OK to order in pizza. (The answer to that was, slightly shockingly, yes.) Back then, I had an outdated emergency bag in the closet stocked with baby formula and tiny bottles of water and I made a promise to myself that night: that in the event of another disaster, I would not be reliant on a torch in the shape of a ladybird, or use my last 2% of phone battery to look at Twitter.
That promise needs refreshing. We live in a new world, now, one in which defence spending takes priority over foreign aid, Russia is once again a threat to Europe and the US can’t be relied upon to save us. In the French government booklet there will, reportedly, be emergency numbers, radio channels and encouragement, should the need arise, to get involved in civil defence-type efforts including volunteer firefighting.
This assumes that some semblance of order survives. My nearest London tube station is one of the city’s deepest, but I’ve seen enough apocalypse shows to know that hiding underground is not the answer; you have either to head north, to a national park where you can outrun the cannibals and hunt game, or barricade yourself in your apartment for three months until the initial anarchy has burned itself out and you can go on a scavenging run to the shops.
And, of course, you must be prepared. After the blackout, I bought a torch so powerful it could double as Mace if you could get an aggressor to look straight into it, and I’m definitely thinking about finding the cable to charge it. I’m also starting to stock up, although it strikes me that the French have left out one important piece of advice from their booklet. A lot of people in New York have generational trauma from relatives who did, indeed, flee Europe decades ago, and the ones I know would point out that missing from the French guidelines is alcohol.
This isn’t a joke. The shrewd prepper understands that if things collapse and money becomes useless, the value of alcohol – for anaesthetic, sterilisation, sedation – rises to the very top of the new currency system. You can pack your tiny bottles of water and buy your tins, but my advice to you, if prepping, is to stop off at the off-licence and grab three bottles of premium whisky and a bottle of Tanqueray – which you are absolutely not allowed to touch until the bombs start falling.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
