Do you have enough extra-virgin olive oil? How about flageolet beans? Pasta? If you’re not well stocked, get some in. This is the only way to survive the Apocalypse Now that is coming in March when no-deal Brexit happens and all food chains are disrupted and Kent becomes a lorry park full of rotting food.
Actually, I don’t know anyone who is stockpiling food, and it’s hardly surprising: a quarter of us have no savings whatsoever and are barely managing as it is. Also, while social media, and indeed all media, engage in a discourse of accusatory sensationalism, there remains a kind of laissez-faire attitude to Brexit among many people that is hardly reported: it’s probably happening, it will take absolutely ages, spare us the gory details. No one knows anything any more. We will still be able to have whisky, beer and PG tips. The more mundane reality is that all food prices will go up and those who have the least will suffer most.
The big tech bros have already bought up half of New Zealand for when the poor of the world rise up against them and they have to retreat to their bunkers. Brexit then, is just one fragment of the many and various end-of-the-world scenarios currently playing out. I’ve seen enough films to know what the future will be like: grey and drizzly with feral people eating each other, but women still somehow able to obtain fishnets and suspenders. There is a strange yearning right now, in some quarters, for us to adopt a blitz mentality, complete with rationing. It’s there at the top of the Tory party amongst those for whom austerity has always been an abstract policy, rather than a day to day reality.
Still, the concern around a no-deal Brexit feels not so much like a war looming on the horizon, more like all the pre-millennial tension that happened in 1999, when we were told all computers would crash come the new year. Civic society, cash machines and car-park barriers would all fail because of the millennium bug that would cause chaos, – a source of incalculable chaos. Our government spent loads of money sending pamphlets to every household, boasting of their “preparedness”. Best of all, they came up with a logo. A ten-legged beast. So, just like now, no one seemed to know anything.
On Boxing Day 1999, the interior designer Kelly Hoppen was asked about stockpiling. She was making sure she had lots of tequila, candles and sexy underwear. “Also, large supplies of Star Essence Angel Rejuvenation Spray to clear my aura.” Jilly Cooper was worried about tranquiliser supplies for her nervous lurcher. These were simpler, more affluent times. I became obsessed with a couple who took to the wilds of Wiltshire to hunt rabbits. By May 2000, they were still unconvinced that it was all clear on the millennium bug. But they were getting divorced. Richard Madeley, who described himself as a millennium “guru”, alarmed viewers with the news that in the New Year there would be no gas and water.
Was that all a collective delusion? Quite possibly. But these days everything appears to be.
I don’t underestimate the real fears of those who rely on insulin, but the wider fear is that no one is in control. The fear around the millennium bug was of technological failure. These new fears are of human error. Ours. Buy some extra tuna if it helps, but if you are really worried, buy some seeds. And plant them.
