South Koreans are buying “survival bags” and turning to YouTube for tips on making it through a nuclear blast. The New York Times is writing articles on How To Survive The Apocalypse and the doomsday preppers are starting to look like the smart ones. This is our world in 2017.

I’ve been considering my chances of surviving should the worst occur. I’ve thought about it at length and have come to the conclusion I need to go in the first blast. Look I’m not suicidal, just realistic. I don’t have what it takes to be a survivor.

I’m a woman who considers foraging to be digging deep into the back of the freezer at Coles for the last packet of Magnums.

I can’t grow my own food, my home is surrounded by a wasteland of gardening despair. The only thing alive is the chilli plant my late husband planted some six years ago. It continues to produce the goods year after year despite constant neglect. But I don’t eat them because they are hot, VERY hot.

When we’re fighting each other for the last scrap of food I haven’t got a chance. I’m the person who apologises to the queue jumper for being in their way. Why do I do that? I was there first, yet I let them step in front of me, every friggin’ time.

Self-defence is impossible. Every knife in the house is blunt, I can’t find the knife sharpener. I don’t own a gun. I have no idea how to make a weapon. My only hope would be to bury attackers alive under the pile of magazines I’m been accumulating for the past 20 years.

Escaping threats is out of the question. I haven’t run since 1992 and that was to get through the doors at the Myer Boxing Day Sale.

I suffer from a serious lack of commitment to anything, particularly anything difficult. Last night I couldn’t even manage to summon up the energy to figure out how to open a bottle of pasta sauce. I ordered pizza instead. Do you think Dominos will still deliver during the apocalypse?

Apparently you should be prepared with goods to barter with in the aftermath of the disaster. Money will become worthless. So cigarettes, tampons and grog could become the new currency of exchange. Again I’m screwed, don’t smoke, menopause and if anyone thinks I’m going through the end of the world sober forget it. If I’ve got wine I’m keeping it for myself.

I’ve never been good at craft or making stuff so building a water filtration system out of a coffee filter and activated charcoal is beyond me. Does anybody have activated charcoal lying around? Would the pile up of ash in my fireplace that I’ve never got around to cleaning out do the job? Or is that something different? I probably should have paid more attention to McGyver back in the day.

Apparently to be prepared you should have a bug out bag, stocked with all the necessities to get you through the first  72 hours of the cataclysmic event. Mine might need some work.

 

The only thing I’ve got going for me is my hoarding tendencies. I’m pretty sure I own everything necessary to survive for generations in my garage. However, finding anything in a hurry would be a challenge. I’m certain the preppers have their survival spaces far better organised than a double garage you struggle to walk into because it’s piled high with unlabeled boxes of stuff with random items strewn around from the last desperate search for a screwdriver, death certificate, fan heater or tennis racket.

Personally, I don’t reckon the minimalists have a chance-in-hell during the apocalypse either.  Seriously, their all-white, uncluttered spaces are simply not going to yield the necessary supplies to last the distance. While in an attack scenario what are they going to use to ward off the intruders? Once they’ve thrown their Matt Blatt Replica Wishbone chair at the marauding invaders there’s not much else to grab in their sparsely decorated rooms.

So me and the minimalists are doomed. Best to go early and go fast I reckon.

What about you? Are you ready to star in a real-life version of Mad Max? What’s your instinct fight, flight or curl up in the foetal position and hope it all goes away?

PS apologies to anyone who thought they were visiting a page seriously looking at the apocalypse you might be better placed looking at this academic article  and this bloke  who seems to have thought it through a lot more carefully than I have.