What kind of prepper are you?

Perhaps, almost seven years later, there are aspects of the Covid lockdown some are nostalgic about, but it’s doubtful the great loo-roll hoarding of 2020 is one of them. And yet, here we appear to be again. Well, nearly.

Some shops sold out of baked beans and water this week, after government advice that we should stockpile supplies to prepare for emergencies “ranging from severe weather to cyber-attacks”. We must Be Ready – which is the name of the campaign that has launched. Security minister Dan Jarvis said that “those who can follow this advice should follow this advice”.

So, what’s your prepper style? Panic? Denial? Ambivalence? I’ve been asking everyone I come into contact with since the news of Be Ready broke. Their reaction to it has, each time, confirmed everything I already knew about who they were.

I’ve been mass interrogating because my prepper style is anxiety-tinged delusion. I’m nervous, but if enough people roll their eyes while saying the government is merely being dramatic, I will be completely reassured and unquestioningly believe them – ill-informed, both generally and precisely, members of the public – over experts armed with classified inside knowledge whose job it is to ensure the safety of the nation. This is ultimately because I’m lazy, and hate supermarkets, but also because I know who I am, and that is somebody who will not survive any kind of serious adversity. Worse, I won’t even try to, I’ll just immediately give up. I never understand why people attempt to get away in zombie apocalypse movies – let them eat your brain and be done with it. I despise running, and what would it be like even if humans did somehow triumph in the end? It would make that time when all the pubs and hairdressers closed in Covid and we were miserable and looked a proper state seem like a picnic.

My husband is the king of it’s-not-just-a-river-in-Egypt, and he is the only person I take no comfort from, when he says that Be Ready is a fuss over nothing. Entirely on brand, he is acting as though I heard about this campaign from some obscure conspiracy-theory site via the dark web, rather than literally the government of our country. He says he doesn’t need to prep because he is a natural hunter-gatherer, an optimist who always makes it work. He’ll catch a squirrel for dinner and roast it over the fire of sheer determination in his soul, totally in his element, ready to insist that it’s actually delicious and we should have tried it years ago. This is a man who would enjoy the challenge of a zombie apocalypse, thrive in it, not least because his hair is never that great anyway.

Slightly further from home, my most suspicious friend is about to get large amounts of cash out to hide around her home, and only hasn’t done so yet because she’s worried about general break-ins – and the eventual looting and pillaging. As soon as she decides whether she trusts the internet or humankind least, she will spring into action. Some particularly right-on, calm, efficient friends already have everything on the checklist in stock, and have since before Be Ready was a twinkle in Wes Streeting’s eye, you know, just in case. Mates at the other end of the organisational spectrum keep meaning to buy the stuff on the list, but have forgotten the list every time they’ve been shopping. My most head-in-the-sand pal, as expected, had absolutely no idea what I was on about when I asked for her thoughts, and told me to shut up when I tried to explain.

What we’re really talking about here is the way we deal with fear. How we manage to keep calm and carry on, go about our business as normal, despite our defence secretary using terms like “state-sponsored terrorism” and saying sentences such as, “in the face of those threats, which are not hypothetical but real, and not somewhere else but increasingly here, we have to step up and take seriously our national resilience as well as our national defence.” We all have our methods for trying to maintain the illusion we have any control.

The fact that everybody is behaving in a manner so true to form does make me wonder about the future of civilisation if something terrible goes down, and I, and all those like me, are wiped out. The world will then be made up of a very specific type of human being. And my husband, of course, resplendent in a squirrel loincloth.

Polly Hudson is a freelance writer

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