So, now we are getting a new US President...

[2ndRateMind]

*Edited by moderator*

...and he worries me...
...I thought I'd review why I'm prepping, what I'm prepping for, and what sort of preps might be appropriate at what sort of stage of threat. Here's my list:

Green: Begin Casual Prepping:
Trigger: General common sense; like any other insurance.
Action: Hold 3 days (plus) supplies. Buy, build and wear constantly Every Day Carry Bag. Get some first aid training. Lose now any excess body-weight you carry (eat less and better, exercise more). Defeat now (get help if necessary) any physical addictions you may have; heroin, cocaine, cannabis, tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, anti-depressants or other non-vital medications, etc. Pay down/off any consumer debt.
Yellow: Prep More Seriously:
Trigger: Realisation of possible vulnerabilities; to weather and/or human vaguaries, including unemployment, terrorism, flood, fire, quake, storm, war, etc.
Action: Hold 3 weeks (plus) supplies. Buy and equip 72hr Bug-Out Bag/Pack/Rucksack/Bergen. Identify bug out location(s). Learn and practice basic survival skills (eg, fire starting, rain water collection, shelter building, growing food at the allotment scale), and test any new equipment you bought/bartered/begged/borrowed. Set and pursue basic physical fitness objectives (start gradually, do a little more each day, always have a testing goal to reach eventually).
Orange: Finalise Preps:
Trigger: Realisation of certain vulnerability; such as the national election of politically extreme governments (left or right) or the rise to national supreme power of extreme religious sects (any religion), etc. Internationally, the rise and proven malicious intent of any globally powerful warmonger.
Action: Hold 3 months (plus) supplies and the equipment and stores to sustain that level (by hunting/fishing/foraging/husbandry/cultivation etc). Stock and equip bug out location(s), and test everything with various simulated emergencies, modifying your preps as you go. Learn and practice more advanced survival skills (eg, night navigation without a GPS satnav, fire starting in wet weather, winter proficiencies, hunting and hunted carcass butchery). Continue to work on physical fitness regime.
Red: Evacuate to bug out location:
Trigger: Realisation of when (and only when!) this is the best option. Immediate danger; sustained local civil disorder; local extra-judicial executions; threat or reality of NBC (nuclear, biological, or chemical) attacks; exhaustion of local resources including food stocks in stores, deliberate pollution, poisoning or depletion of the water supply, end of electricity and/or natural gas supplies, no petrol (gas) in pumps, failure of ATM cash machines; declaration of martial law; threat or reality of invasion; etc, may all be factors.
Action: Get soonest to your better place, and be mentally prepared to live out the rest of your life in a 'perpetual war of all against all' and in the expectation that that life will be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short', as Thomas Hobbes put it, in his Leviathan (1651).
Black, with a bright White hope: Post apocalyptic reality:
Trigger: Realisation that however well prepped we are, however virtuously self-reliant, we mere individuals will never be prepped enough to sustain ourselves in good order, indefinitely, in the absence of mutual cooperation with our fellows.
Action: Rebuild civilisation, the way it should have been, in the first place. (free, equal - in all ways, not just the occasional vote - and especially fraternal, as the French revolutionaries circa AD 1790 wanted, and Jesus of Nazareth circa AD 30 would have endorsed). A more modern formulation is for a 'SHE' world: sane, humane, and ecological.

You're welcome, all, to criticise (I hope constructively) this list.

Best wishes, 2RM.

[Plymtom]

I think we need to reserve judgement there's an awful lot of hype there's good advice on another thread, we need to remember we're UK preppers it's all about the price of tea don't you know seriously we never rule out the worst case scenarios as possibilities, and yet we need to not start thinking of them in terms of likelihoods, and as I've always said you need options, what ifs? too firm a plan or vision is a liability in itself, this election I admit I looked at two ways, looking at both candidates I could be sorry one won and glad the other lost whichever way it went

[2ndRateMind]

Thanks for the reply.

As regards the OP, I'm on alert green/yellow right now, progressing towards orange.

So, I built a list of stuff to put in my 72hr bug out bergen. Some items still to get. But it's now packed with the kit I already own. And it's already too heavy, with food, clothing and water still to go in...
Guess I'll need to hone it down, some. But, for the moment, if there is a fire or something in my block of flats, it's ready and waiting to grab, on my way out, and I'll be in pretty good shape.

A minor thought, meanwhile, on physical fitness efforts. Muscles, used vigorously, like a little time repair themselves before they are tested again. The best way to accomplish this, I find, while still 'doing a little more each day', is to divide the body into three muscle groups (say, legs and abdominals, heart and lungs, arms and upper body), and exercise only two out the three each day, resting the other one.

Best wishes, 2RM.

[Arzosah]

Interesting!

I won't go into the scale of events and responses that you've laid out, 2RM, there's a book in that single post but I have to say, if someone self-identified as a prepper, and had only 3 days worth of food in the house, I'd have my doubts I mean, most people shop weekly, meaning they get 7 days worth in one go, and its to be expected that their houses aren't completely empty of food by the time they do their weekly shop - so perfectly ordinary people could stretch their supplies to, say, two weeks? I don't think thats unrealistic.

The price of tea is uppermost in my mind (and I took delivery of an awful lot of teabags from Asda today ) but I am also a traitor: a dozen bags or so of ground coffee jumped in to my house as well

[2ndRateMind]

Hi, Arzosah

I don't disagree with anything you have said.

As for the three days (plus) supplies, at the green reaction level, I was kind of interested in people just starting out in the hobby/lifestyle/obsession, and didn't want to frighten anyone off. Many people don't even have that much; and my own worry is that once the supermarket and convenience store shelves are cleared, (say, within 3 - 24 hrs of an emergency) many less affluent households are within a day or so running out of vital stuff, like, say, meat, potatoes and veggies. Admittedly household supplies of tea, and even marmite(!), might be expected to last a little longer, and if the emergency conveniently happens the day after you do the weekly shop, you may well be able to stretch things out for the two weeks you mention.

But the key thing is to get started with this self-reliant prepping thing, and you have to start somewhere. The worst way to do this in respect of morale is to begin by beating yourself up because you haven't got 2 years (plus) supplies, and can't afford to buy them outright. Holding even 3 days minimum stock levels is looking further ahead than many do, and the principle and discipline of just planning along these lines is, perhaps, even more important than the stocks themselves, which can be gradually built up from three days to three weeks to three months and more, over time. Ultimately, the green level of reaction is about starting to put in place the necessary foundations on which to build a prepping career, and so improve both personal and national resilience.

So that was my thinking behind that level of response. Hope it makes sense!

Best wishes, 2RM.

[Plymtom]

It's funny looking at the OP again, I don't think my lifestyle ( either when I was a child nor as a married adult) ever slumped as low as the green level, in terms of household stocks I probably went mostly from the yellow level, I never intended ( nor do) to bug out whilst can see that evacuation temporarily could be on the cards even without a major SHTF event, as for physical fitness many family members are disabled, I'm in my mid 50's with several health issues which would bugger me up in short order if the NHS went down for long, plus I'd tend to have a more "Uncle Buck" approach, I'm handy and a long way from helpless, more a Ray than a Bear, the outdoor skills you speak of I really like in a hobby type way so do have and try in as much as we can to test all sorts of equipment and would love to be able to get away for a few days and rough it as I did as a youngster, back then it was good to get out of the city put up a tent and sit around a fire etc, I can only imagine how nice it would be in this day and age to escape the constant buzz of appliances and technology and current affairs, I have lived through very many terms of office of many a regime or individual in what has been a crazy and probably more dangerous world than it is right now, in fact I'm possibly a good deal more optimistic about the future as I see the world coming to it's senses slightly, anyway anything above yellow is an options thing.

As for Post apocalyptic scenarios, I'm cynical about that, if we cannot get through as a species, I can't see us emerging initially as a better bunch, there's every chance it would be dog eat dog, or lead by a bunch of religious fanatics in factions dotted around globally, humanity needs to take control, own it's destiny rather than let it all go to shite in the hope we will do better next time

[2ndRateMind]

I know I've written the OP in the second person imperative (you should do this; you should do that) but, really, most of it is messages to myself. I should lose some weight, I should drink less wine, I should exercise more and get fitter, etc. Well, prepping is a journey, more than a destination. And every journey starts with a single step, and persists in the same way.

Cheers, 2RM.

[2ndRateMind]

So, I built a list of stuff to put in my 72hr bug out bergen. Some items still to get. But it's now packed with the kit I already own. And it's already too heavy, with food, clothing and water still to go in...
Guess I'll need to hone it down, some. But, for the moment, if there is a fire or something in my block of flats, it's ready and waiting to grab, on my way out, and I'll be in pretty good shape.

Decided why the pack's too heavy. Most of the issue is mixing up long term survival with 72 hr bug out. So, I have some extra kit it's going to be really nice to have in a SHTF, TEOTWAWKI scenario. But, that's not what a BOB is for. All that's required in the pilgrim bergen is the stuff I'm going to need, traveling on foot, away from population centres and towards my chosen bug out location. So, I have an old karrimor jaguar rucksack, which is still serviceable, and which is being filled now with all the excess of gear I don't absolutely, definitely need to travel with in extremis. Perhaps I'll be able to retrieve it later.

Cheers, 2RM.

[2ndRateMind]

So, I spent the day pleasantly enough, sorting out 3 x 24 hr ration packs, for my 72hr bug out bergen. Each weighs around 1.3 kilos. Here's the daily manifest:

Breakfast: 1 x 400g can of 'All Day Breakfast'
Lunch: 1 x cup a soup. 1 x 3 pack of oat and milk biscuits. 1 x 75g meat/fish paste to spread on them. 1 x club chocolate orange biscuit.
Main meal: 1 x cup a soup. 1 x 400g can of beef stew/ravioli/chicken curry, etc. 1 x 200g can of fruit.
Snacks & morale boosters: 1 x packet of nuts. 1 x packet of wine gums/boiled sweets/jelly babies. 1 x 80g tin of weight watchers tuna. 1 x instant noodles.

All the above fits easily into a viper large molle pouch (three in total for 72 hrs)

In addition, a brew kit: Instant coffee, teabags, sugar, whitener, oxo cubes; all in 100-250 ml nalgene bottles.

Other stuff to add later, maybe. peperami or jerk beef. bog roll. disposable cigarette lighter. chewing gum. multivitamin pill.

Don't know how many calories this all adds up to, but I think it would compare well to a military ration pack, and it definitely cost less. (I used Aldi, Asda and Tesco). Just don't forget you'll need a can opener, as well, if you decide to copy.

Best wishes, 2RM

[Deeps]

So, I spent the day pleasantly enough, sorting out 3 x 24 hr ration packs, for my 72hr bug out bergen. Each weighs around 1.3 kilos. Here's the daily manifest:

Breakfast: 1 x 400g can of 'All Day Breakfast'
Lunch: 1 x cup a soup. 1 x 3 pack of oat and milk biscuits. 1 x 75g meat/fish paste to spread on them. 1 x club chocolate orange biscuit.
Main meal: 1 x cup a soup. 1 x 400g can of beef stew/ravioli/chicken curry, etc. 1 x 200g can of fruit.
Snacks & morale boosters: 1 x packet of nuts. 1 x packet of wine gums/boiled sweets/jelly babies. 1 x 80g tin of weight watchers tuna. 1 x instant noodles.

All the above fits easily into a viper large molle pouch (three in total for 72 hrs)

In addition, a brew kit: Instant coffee, teabags, sugar, whitener, oxo cubes; all in 100-250 ml nalgene bottles.

Other stuff to add later, maybe. peperami or jerk beef. bog roll. disposable cigarette lighter. chewing gum. multivitamin pill.

Don't know how many calories this all adds up to, but I think it would compare well to a military ration pack, and it definitely cost less. Just don't forget you'll need a can opener, as well, if you decide to copy.

Best wishes, 2RM

For 72 hours I wouldn't worry about it too much, unless you're built like a racing snake you'll get by fine on the standard 2000/2500 calories. You might be hungry if you're burning more but you'll not succumb to a pie-abetic coma.