People in the EU are being advised to stockpile enough food, water, and essentials for 72 hours in a continent-wide strategy to make everyone more prepared for catastrophes such as floods, fires, pandemics, and military attacks.
And it makes me feel more than a little jittery.
The suggested emergency kit should include ID documents in waterproof casing, a Swiss army knife, and playing cards, according to Hadja Lahbib, the European Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness, and Crisis Management.
It worries me when the authorities start doling out advice like this because some of my darkest childhood memories are of ‘survival manuals’ that really didn’t make me feel safe at all – and I don’t think these ones will either.
This latest advice comes just days after the French government announced that it will produce survival manuals to prepare citizens for any ‘imminent threat’ to the country. It’s a scary list of circumstances, with examples like invasions, natural disasters, industrial accidents, or a nuclear leak.
It will suggest a ‘survival kit’ including plenty of water and food, plus basic medical supplies including paracetamol, compresses, and saline solution.
But France is not alone. Last year, Sweden told people to gather blankets and battery-powered radios, Norway suggested iodine tablets in case things go nuclear, and Germany told people to transform their cellars or garages into bunkers.
It is a cause for concern in an increasingly unstable world, and all of this brings back memories of a survival manual that absolutely petrified me when I was a kid.
The Protect and Survive pamphlet was released by the British government in the 1970s and 80s, advising us how to protect ourselves during a nuclear attack.
It was a terrifying read right from the menacing first page: ‘Read this booklet with care. Your life and the lives of your family may depend upon it.’
Things got no happier over the next 30 pages, which suggested how to build a fallout room and an inner refuge that we could stay in for two weeks and what food to stock.
The details got steadily grimmer, including special ‘sanitation arrangements’ and what to do if someone dies. Envy them, I suppose.
And I don’t think that’s changed much in the intervening decades.
If you found yourself outdoors as the mushroom cloud went up, you were advised to ‘lie flat (in a ditch) and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands’.
People who lived in bungalows were warned that their homes would ‘not give much protection’, while those who dwelt in caravans were told, with weapons-grade dismissiveness, that ‘your local authority will be able to advise you on what to do’.
I read the booklet in 1984 as an 11-year-old, shortly after I watched Threads, the terrifyingly brilliant BBC film about nuclear war. That film traumatised me and made me determined that the horrific scenes would never come true.
So I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to try and stop a nuclear war and I read Protect and Survive to try and work out what to do if there was one.
My parents were a bit surprised when I suddenly covered my clothes in CND badges, spiked my hair up and began to spend my Saturday afternoons at peace demos rather than football matches. They were absolutely horrified when I started unscrewing the living room door.
It would be easy to say that Protect and Survive did nothing positive for me but it did. Its laughably futile advice taught me at an early age that, when push comes to shove, our rulers won’t be able to save us and we’ll have to look after ourselves.
I’ll always be grateful for that wake-up call.
But I can trace back a disaster document scaring me even further.
I was six years old when I went on my first flight and it was quite a debut: a 24-hour flight to Australia.
There was little inflight entertainment in those days – just a couple of films broadcast at a set time on a screen far away.
I got so bored and the only thing handy to distract me was an illustrated booklet explaining what to do if the plane crashed.
The more I looked at the cold illustrations of oxygen masks, life rafts, people whizzing down chutes from a mangled jet, or bobbing around in the sea with only a whistle to protect them, the more my boredom turned into terror.
At six years of age, I was old enough to understand the horror of what the illustrations were depicting but not old enough to grasp that, even though we were being warned what to do if the plane crashed, that didn’t mean the plane would crash, nor that it was even likely to.
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Even when I read Protect and Survive five years later I wasn’t sassy or resigned enough to understand the obvious truth that, if you find yourself under nuclear attack or in a serious plane crash, the best thing to do in either scenario might be just to simply die.
I felt more scared than informed, but maybe that’s part of the point of this sudden rush of survival manuals in Europe.
A population that’s unsettled and on a war footing against an unspecified and unexplained threat might be more malleable and forgiving of their rulers’ performance. So maybe they’re trying to protect us, but maybe they’re trying to scare us, too.
That said, many people’s lives have been saved by following the advice in air safety briefings, and while the tips in the European manuals may seem obvious to you and me, there’s nothing wrong with being prepared, and they could save people’s lives in these precarious times we live in.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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