Tomorrow’s World
Forty years ago this month, BBC1 screened a new drama series penned by Dalek creator Terry Nation; but this was no journey through space and time; this was very much the here and now. Nation’s chilling portrayal of a Britain in meltdown tapped into the contemporary paranoia of the mid-1970s – fears of right-wing coups by retired colonels forming private armies; fears of left-wing coups by trade unions funded from Moscow; fears of energy shortages inspired by the global oil crisis and the Three-Day Week; and, most of all, fears that the human race was living on borrowed time.
‘Survivors’ was rooted in far more adult territory than ‘Doctor Who’, and the memorably apocalyptic opening episode, which I saw as an unsettled seven-year-old, depicted the swift and sudden obliteration of the familiar and the reassuring. A man-made plague swept across the world, although our focus was on Britain, and specifically England. We were introduced to a small cast of characters, each of whom experienced the killer disease claiming friends and family, leaving them to abandon the charnel-house urban atmosphere for a rural wilderness that seemed (on the surface, at least) a safer bet. ‘Survivors’ is like ‘The Good Life’ directed by Bergman.
Over the course of three series, ‘Survivors’ chronicled the coming together of disparate individuals into self-sufficient communities, returning the country to its agricultural origins, forced to learn ancient skills in the absence of electricity and petrol-driven machinery. But if that sounds like a dull ‘Open University’ experiment to see how people might cope when deprived of their creature comforts, it wasn’t. The abrupt disappearance of the framework of civilised society – law and order, a police force, a judiciary, a government – provoked an ‘every man for himself’ attitude in which not all were committed to the common good. Pillaging criminal gangs on one hand and pseudo-fascist vigilantes on the other roamed across this eerie vision of Britain and left the viewer in no doubt that there would be precious little signs of a resurrected ‘Blitz Spirit’ if the premise of ‘Survivors’ became our reality.
There are numerous occasions throughout the series in which it belatedly dawns on the characters just how dependent they’ve been on the technology they’ve taken for granted. But, lest we forget, this was 1975 – the pre-internet age, the pre-mobile phone age, the pre-Facebook, Twitter and texting age. Forty years ago, there were no emails or any form of online correspondence; people wrote letters and used a landline telephone (or a public call box); and yet, what to us now appear quaint household trinkets – full colour TV sets, transistor radios or stereo music-systems – were, at the time of the programme’s broadcast, domestic objects of desire that it was hard to imagine life without.
People of every age naturally see themselves as inhabitants of the most technologically advanced society the world has ever seen, which they are; but what strikes the DVD viewer coming to a series like ‘Survivors’ four decades since it aired is that the dependence those characters have on technology is nowhere near the dependence we have on technology today.
Were an actual event such as that portrayed in ‘Survivors’ to strike Britain in 2015, I doubt the genuine survivors would cope half as well as the fictitious survivors of Terry Nation’s grim masterpiece. Even the youngest adult characters in the series are in their mid-twenties, meaning they would have been born in the early 1950s, carrying memories of post-war austerity and an inherited practicality born of the make-do-and-mend mindset of ration-book Britain. Their education would have prepared them for a blue-collar trade or a white-collar workplace, even academia at a time when one had to be of above-average intelligence to qualify. Reliance on one’s hands or one’s intellect meant they brought a distinct breadth of talents to the table that would enable them to apply these talents to the task at hand. The drastic disappearance of what to us seems like basic technology hits them hard, but doesn’t leave them in despair. They are secure in the knowledge that their life before ‘the sickness’ imbued them with skills they now have need to call on.
Living one’s life in a virtual world that revolves around the narcissistic worship of the self, one facilitated by pocket technology, would be a drawback to survival; possessing knowledge that extends no further than being able to name each transitory starlet to invite a press photographer’s camera up her skirt would be a drawback to survival; devoting spare time to binging on the trivial, fuelled by mass-produced fast-food, would be a drawback to survival; receiving an education in which ‘media studies’ is regarded as a legitimate and worthwhile life lesson would be a drawback to survival; earning a living by taking a place in a chorus line of cold-callers, asking strangers if they’d ever considered installing double glazing, would be a drawback to survival; settling for the perpetual adolescence supported by a mother’s mollycoddling that ensures clothes are washed and dinner is served would be a drawback to survival. In short, so much of what it prized and praised today would be absolutely no use whatsoever.
On a personal note, I’ve had a lot of trouble with my computer lately. In the last few months, my mouse, my keyboard and my monitor have all conked out and have needed replacing; my increasingly erratic internet connection has been something of an inconvenience over the past seven days as well. This household appliance is of particular importance to me and anything that goes wrong with it prevents me from not only working, but from being in contact with 75% of the people I regard as friends. Of course, I wasn’t presented with a computer as a christening present (there wouldn’t have been enough space in the church to house the entire wall a 1960s computer would have needed, for one thing); over half of the life I’ve lived so far didn’t have a computer in it, so I know what it’s like not to have one. But the crucial point is that, having had one, I cannot now imagine what I would do if suddenly deprived of it.
Yes, you can’t miss what you’ve never had. And what made ‘Survivors’ such a compelling and ingenious series is the fact that it shows people who have had items that made their life easier taken away in an instant, and they then have to devise a life bereft of them. I’d certainly struggle in that situation, but I dread to think how those twenty or twenty-five years younger than me would. They have even less intellectual and practical tools at their disposal than me. This society will not be inherited by those prepared for what could happen should that society collapse overnight. Their encouraged detachment from it, encouraged by corporations, governments and industries that rely upon their blind, unthinking acquiescence, will reduce the population to the level of Morlocks within a generation should disaster befall it. After all, even the name of Terry Nation’s series has had its meaning turned inside out this century.
It is true; you reap what you sow – but in the case of the cast of ‘Survivors’, that cliché referred to self-sufficiency, not selfie-sufficiency.
Petunia Winegum
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April 27, 2015 at 9:08 am -
Now you know why we are importing people from sub-Saharan Africa!
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April 27, 2015 at 9:22 am -
The first paragraph sounds more like “The Guardians” a London Weekend series at that time precisely about government losing control and imposing a paramilitary police force. I distinctly remember real life army exercises at Heathrow airport in early 1974 which got people’s paranoia going . It was a wild time. BBC reporters for the Today programme were interviewing people at Heathrow leaving the country (emigrating in disgust).
Britain perceived as a failed state because people couldn’t get out quick enough.
Now its supposed to be a failed state because people can’t get in quick enough.
What a difference 40 years makes! -
April 27, 2015 at 9:32 am -
YouTube is awash with videos made by individuals that Americans describe as “preppers”. Some of these videos are amusing, some ridiculous and others highly disturbing. These so called “preppers” claim to be demonstrating or teaching the skills that will be necessary in order to survive some unspecified catastrophe, often referred to as WTSHTF, which I take to mean “when the shit hits the fan”. From what I’ve seen, most of these people will end up just as dead as the rest of us if and when the worst happens. My guess is that even individuals such as Ray Mears or Bear Grylls won’t last for very long after a true nuclear meltdown.
As for less far less traumatic events, these days most people under the age of about 50 wet themselves if separated from their life support device aka mobile phones.-
April 27, 2015 at 10:55 am -
I’ve read lots of criticisms of these US “preppers”. The main one is that for all their boasts about being able to survive without technology, they are still dependent on it; they stock up on petrol, guns and ammunition, medical supplies, for example. Eventually their petrol is going to run out (if it doesn’t evaporate first), their medicines will run out and even if they make their own bullets they’re going to need ongoing supplies of metal and chemicals. Many preppers go into it with the belief that when disaster hits everybody outside their compound will be an enemy to be driven off or killed, yet in a real apocalypse their ongoing survival will depend on making alliances with others.
I liked the original Survivors series; I believe that John Seymour, the original self-sufficiency ‘guru’, was a consultant and made sure that all the scenes of skin-curing, soap-making and so on were authentic – to the extent that the actors sometimes complained about the stink on set!
In fact, I like this type of apocalypse fiction in general – there’s few sights more pleasurable than seeing the shining towers of the City bankers being wiped out – even though none of them address the rather important question of what will happen to all those suddenly unattended nuclear power stations…..-
April 27, 2015 at 3:37 pm -
“…..what will happen to all those suddenly unattended nuclear power stations…..”
Panic ye not. If the power goes off, the control rods fall automatically into the reactor core, and it shuts down. The principle is known in the trade as “fail to safety”, and is mandatory requirement of a reactor design getting a licence. Unfortunately, it’s a weeny little detail the Russians forgot when designing Chernobyl….
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April 27, 2015 at 3:57 pm -
Not exactly. The reactor at Chernobyl had a design flaw, that meant dropping the rods temporarily increased the output. They forgot to tell the operators…
At first the operators were blamed, but a later investigation of the negative void coefficient, as it was called, exonerated them.
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April 27, 2015 at 4:26 pm -
I have a relative who is an engineer at a nuke plant – I must ask him about this sometime. He once told me that his job description could be boiled down to “stopping the damm thing from going bang”.
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April 27, 2015 at 6:47 pm -
That goes for most of us, from conceptual and detail design, through manufacture and construction to operation and maintenance! It sometimes seems almost incidental that the damn thing is supposed to make electrickery….
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April 27, 2015 at 4:49 pm -
The real problem is the hundreds of tons of spent fuel sitting in “temporary” storage pools, much of which still needs constant cooling for the next few decades before beng transferred to the long-term storage we have yet to build.
If the power goes out the coolant stops circulating, the spent fuel heats up and eventually catches fire, spewing nuclear contamination along with the smoke. Fire fighters of the future may have very short lifespans!Incidentally, the technology needed to remove the corium (melted fuel cores) from under the former Fukushima nuclear plant is yet to be invented – in the meantime ground water flows through the site and out to the pacific carrying radioactive particles as it goes.
Engineers at Chernobyl are still making the new “tomb” for the site – essentially the solution has been to bury the problem and pray. Unlike Fukushima, at Chernobyl the fuel cells exploded up and out, and much of the core material was recovered (by unprotected workers picking the stuff up manually!) and buried with the reactor. Luckily, at chernobyl there is no ocean next to the site…-
April 27, 2015 at 6:52 pm -
The real problem with spent fuel (or the waste left after extracting the useful material left after reactor use) is political, not technical. When the go-ahead is given for a suitable site (and there are many in the UK) we can all just get on and build it. That has been the case since about 1990.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the storage ponds, either. The case you cited has been thought of and provided for….
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April 28, 2015 at 9:38 am -
That’s not what a geologist friend tells me, one who was a co-author of a government study to select long term storage sites back in the 80s. The problems are most definitely more than just political.
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April 28, 2015 at 7:30 pm -
The original site selected (very close to Sellafield, and mainly for political reasons) was indeed a non-starter because of a very fractured geology and excessive water movement. There are, however, quite a few geologically suitable sites. Sadly, not all of them are politically suitable.
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April 27, 2015 at 8:35 pm -
No but there is a bloody big river next to it. Also the Exclusion Zone is a fantastic nature reserve, I used to enjoy taking the train onto site when I worked there.
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April 27, 2015 at 9:38 am -
Natural selection will sort things out.
One advantage of all the immigration is that there will be plenty of genetic variation to select from.
Out-of-control biological warfare is still, indeed more than ever, a much bigger danger than nuclear war.
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April 27, 2015 at 9:39 am -
I await the next Carrington event.
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April 27, 2015 at 10:03 am -
” …returning the country to its agricultural origins, forced to learn ancient skills in the absence of electricity and petrol-driven machinery. ”
Sounds like the policies some of the more-extreme EcoLoons would inflict on mankind.
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April 27, 2015 at 10:36 am -
Whaddya mean ‘would’? They already are. Have you seen Britain’s energy policy recently?
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April 27, 2015 at 11:36 am -
The energy policy they are using at the moment, based on labour’s climate change act, is nothing compared to the one that labour will foist on the country if they get back into power at this election.
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April 27, 2015 at 10:41 am -
V good piece. The series was gripping, but the reality we have already much worse: looking back now, I wish a gargoyle-targeted pandemic had wiped out every disordered ego on the planet some time around 1990.
The case against neoliberal everything-must-break and we-must-have-growth drivel is overwhelming – as is that against the EU and the euro. The media have nevertheless managed to persuade everyone to keep calm and carry on: because anything could happen, nothing must change.
Yet the encouraging thing is that the mutual model of company formation is the fastest-growing business form. Survivors did, it seems to me, point out that Homo sapiens would have no choice but to return to its original success based on competition and cooperation.
Today, we have Grant Shapps-style competition whose success is based on stuffing, scamming, hurting and bankrupting the customer. It is called ‘the natural order of things’, but it isn’t: it is Bedlam heading for disaster. -
April 27, 2015 at 10:54 am -
Most in my profession are acutely aware of the effects of technological development, and it’s ‘two-edged sword’ nature. There are many things that have benefitted mankind greatly – think of easily available electrical power, modern pharmaceuticals, the relative ease of modern travel and transport, for example – allowing population to expand far beyond what would be sustainable in a subsistence level of technology. However, there are any number of problems, too. The depletion of some natural resources, and severe pressure in some places on others such as water, to quote just two examples.
I also rather doubt that many people appreciate the huge amount of effort and expertise needed to support all this technology. One really does wonder whe the effort and skills needed – and the money – starts to exceed that available. We don’t seem to have found that point yet, though.
From a purely personal point of view, I’m finding that I like the simpler things in life more and more. Things that last, and fewer of them. True enough, there are some wonderful inventions and gadgets out there, but do you ‘need’ them all? I have a dish-washer (it was in the house when I bought it), but I’ve never used it; I wash up in the sink. It just wastes space. I no longer have a television, but don’t miss it a bit (Six Nations rugby excepted). There are limits, though – I’d rather have central heating than open coal fires, and I’d sooner have a gas or electric cooker than a solid fuel range. I suppose it’s for each to ‘find their own level’ in their own homes, but as a society? That’s a much harder conundrum….
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April 27, 2015 at 11:17 am -
Should the ultimate catastrophe happen, then ‘engineer’ may finally achieve its deserved high status in the new order of things. I want Engineer on my side when it does.
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April 27, 2015 at 3:17 pm -
Maybe not the engineers in that scenario – these days, we’re either far too technically specialised, or desk-bound managers. Perhaps the blacksmiths and gardeners will come into their own, though; not the carpenters, these days – they’d be stuffed once the batteries had run down on their power tools. Some of them struggle to use a hand tool, now.
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April 28, 2015 at 1:16 pm -
The head of B&Q was recently complaining that the influx of cheap skilled labour has caused a big dent in the DIY market. I would think that part of the loss of interest can also be attributed to the push to over-professionalise DIY by the continued pushing of pro-level power tools that the DIYer will use once in a blue moon. The reaches a point where it seems that to do DIY you need to be as tooled up as a professional, when most of the time hand toold will suffice. The other the tip broke off the end of one of our chef’s knives, and I remarked to Mrs R that I needed to grind down the sharp break on the back edge to form a curve. “You could do that in a couple of minutes, if you had a Dremmel,” she said. I just pulled out a file and did it in much the same.
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April 27, 2015 at 12:02 pm -
There is a very large gap between us ‘old fogies’ and the present generation and it is getting wider because of Blair and his ‘education, education. education’ which turned out to be ‘dumb, dumber, dumbest’.
I expect that you, like me, could make a small dynamo if push came to shove and it became necessary to do so but I doubt that very few of the present generation would even know where to start. When a civilisation becomes a consumer society it is heading for problems when the few that know how things work are gone. In fact, I would say that the west is at that stage now. We only need to close a few more coal fired power stations because the eco-loons/green blob demands it and then when the wind stops blowing and the power goes off there will be panic on the streets on a much larger scale than we have seen in the past.
Is there a way round this doom and gloom? Yes, education to at least the standard of the 40s and 50s. Will that happen? I very much doubt it.
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April 27, 2015 at 3:23 pm -
“We only need to close a few more coal fired power stations because the eco-loons/green blob demands it and then when the wind stops blowing and the power goes off there will be panic on the streets on a much larger scale than we have seen in the past.”
Yes, indeed. We are closer to that than many think. In fact, National Grid Transco have put in place a series of contracts with owners of standby diesel generators (which has caused the creation of several firms who only own standby generators with the sole purpose of supplying the Grid on demand) to supply the grid, at a very handsome price, should that come to pass. They were not needed this winter (just), but when we get a really cold one….
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April 27, 2015 at 11:09 pm -
I believe these standby generators get a fee just for being “on call”, even if they don’t actually get to supply any electricity.
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April 27, 2015 at 11:20 am -
Perhaps that was the idea behind “the Arab Spring”.
Season after season of Survivors but with no need to pay any actors or script-writers.
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go. It’s the freakiest show. -
April 27, 2015 at 11:22 am -
I don’t really see much in the argument that ‘technology is bad because humanity will be less prepared for a post-apocalyptic future’. That’s true, but who cares? Cavemen would be best prepared of all in such a scenario, but who wants to live like a caveman just so you will be able to fashion a sturdy spear come the apocalypse?
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April 27, 2015 at 11:49 am -
A couple of years ago we were being told a Solar Flare would knock out all the satellites, planes would drop out of the sky and the internet would become a white dot on the black screen as all the servers in California went *pop*…….. And then there was the San Andreas Fault…..
* drums fingers impatiently while waiting for the end of days *
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April 27, 2015 at 3:06 pm -
And who (except the Indie) can forget:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
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April 27, 2015 at 4:01 pm -
See my comment about the Carrington event – a massive solar flare. That’s exactly what that was, in the 1800s, which means it’s not that uncommon. People in caves and the deep jungle will not even know, but the rest of us who depend on just in time food deliveries to the supermarket will find just what living in the stone age entails.
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April 27, 2015 at 4:18 pm -
* the rest of us who depend on just in time food deliveries to the supermarket will find just what living in the stone age entails *
What? Like Xmas Eve you mean?…
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April 28, 2015 at 1:19 pm -
Surely we only have to worry about solar flares once there are too many Triffids around?
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April 27, 2015 at 11:31 am -
I am a survivor of WW2 Hitler, austerity, persistent impetigo, the nit comb, severe measles, a killer in the thirties. The risk of bovine TB. An aunt had it disfiguring her neck. The risk of polio. Terry in my class at grammar had it in his weak arm and so did one of our class teachers in his arm. All our nursing PTS were mantoux positive for TB, bar one who came from a remote Irish farm. I think we exchanged germs in those ghastly earthed up shelters, that stank of damp and creosote…now banned. If you transported parents and kids back to those times, they would bore themselves to death moaning about the cold in winter….dreadful. The food..nothing out of season. Kids disapearing all day to the woods or canal sides. No one I knew got drowned, killed, lost. We came across lots of pervs and strange men with war traumas wandering the lanes. We ran or hid or ignored them. My dad built a big shed for us to play in bad weather and mum to grow tomatoes in. He re leathered our worn out shoe soles. Made a chicken coup for eggs and boiled fowl when they stopped laying. Dad pulled their necks and gran a no 21 pulled out their innards. We liked chip butties and scraping out the baking bowl, snowballing, ice skating on the village pond. Sledging in the grounds of a hotel. French cricket. Double skipping to chanted rhymes. Cats cradle. Lovely long icy slides in the playground. Simple pleasures now lost to childhood. No one wants to lose their luxuries these days. Think of Nepal. Hard lives made drastically harder in the shake of an earthquake’s shoulders. I like the chill taken off, the C/H is still on, set to 18C and glad to pay the cost. The Romans had it so why not us?
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April 27, 2015 at 12:09 pm -
Hear. Hear.
Those were indeed the days where we learned to live with what was available and make our own toys to play with. As you say, modern children would be lost in such an environment.
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April 27, 2015 at 2:53 pm -
Yes but there’s will also be the drive to make the most of what we have. Make do. Manage. Im not rushing out to buy stuff to use to get over an “incident”. I have loads of tools etc. we try to maintain a drawer with basic foodstuffs which has worked okay but you need to make sure things are in date.
I’d like to avoid an “incident” but if not hey ho…
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April 27, 2015 at 3:35 pm -
* in date *
… ???…. !!!! What sort of namby-pamby survivorship is this?
Ugh… scratches in earth… bugs and worms found …
no date on them… might have gorn orf…..
refuses to eat….
fails to survive…..
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April 27, 2015 at 11:38 am -
If you had a genuine apocalypse, driving the population down in an instant, there are probably huge stocks of appropriate hand tools available by pillaging – every house in my street probably already has a small axe, a garden fork and spade, and my street had a supply of cooking pots that would service one group of Survivors for generations, without raiding B & Q! It wouldn’t take much to find one house with a fireplace (I’ve still got one), and outside barbecue of the solid fuel variety for cooking. I’m sure that there are ample stocks of tinned food before I got enough stuff grown, but I suspect that I’d have to develop a taste for urban fox meat!
I can recommend the post-apocalyptic novels of John Wyndham: The Kraken Wakes, The Day of the Triffids, and perhaps The Chrysalids.
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April 27, 2015 at 8:41 pm -
I’d quite like to be in Ballard’s Drowned World living in a roof garden in a tropical London, with barely anyone else left.
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April 28, 2015 at 1:29 pm -
Wyndham’s short story The Wheel (in the Jizzle collection) can be seen as a prologue for The Chrysalids.
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April 27, 2015 at 11:54 am -
The model is familiar though, isn’t it? From the Lord of the Flies through to the Walking Dead, Hunger Games and such. Take back to nature premise and add complicating plot device of your choice. Even the biblical Flood could be read as a removal of sophistication and decadence. Now I think of it, didn’t your man have a beard and sandals in The Good Life one week?
There is comfort though in that people still can step back from their electronic lives into their real ones. That’s happening this morning in Nepal. Ordinary people are going about their business helping each other, and you might think that there is little else worthwhile to do in such circumstances. There is also the case that the poorer one becomes and the more remote from what passes for civilisation, the more likely you are to find that a stranger will offer a helping hand, sometimes even when you are not yet aware that you need one. Life out there requires people to stick together a little bit more. Encouragingly you only have to get yourself thirty miles out of the city to find this happening. Life can be, and is, lived more communally than it is in Starbucks.
I think though that a generator would be item 1 for my survival list.
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April 28, 2015 at 1:31 pm -
My wife and I are already agreed that our immediate itinerary after The Event will be a quick trip to Homebase, immediately followed by the local TA depot….
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April 27, 2015 at 1:24 pm -
As a war baby, Ms Mildred’s comments bring back memories.
I think HMG used to keep stocks of essential foods, some in large cans, cheese, butter all sorts. Every so many years there was inspection , disposal, & replacement. Last I heard this was early ’70s, so I guess it’s gone the way of bunkers for the great & good, & the smaller ones for the sacrificial nuclear fallout observers.
But what do you do? I bought my grandson a good knife when he was in the Cubs, hopefully he’s still permitted it in the Scouts, but do you teach ’em how to survive today’s world or a ruined one?
Mind you, the Black Death changed forever the position of the agricultural labourer vs the landowner. Until mechanisation & industrialisation came along. Today it would reduce the housing shortage; and price.-
April 27, 2015 at 4:01 pm -
” ..I bought my grandson a good knife when he was in the Cubs, hopefully he’s still permitted it in the Scouts, ..”
If he’s in the UK, won’t he risk getting arrested for carrying a bladed weapon?
http://members.scouts.org.uk/supportresources/86/can-scouts-carry-knives?moduleID=4
“However, it is not illegal for anyone to carry a foldable, non-locking knife, like a swiss army knife, in a public place as long as the blade is shorter than three inches (7.62cms)” Surely, a knife with a blade <3" can hardly be described as 'good'
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April 27, 2015 at 5:48 pm -
I survived Scouts and other things with only my trusty penknife. About the only use my large sheath knife has had was to theatrically cut open a haggis. A blade longer than 3 inches just isn’t really needed. Sure, good sized kitchen knives are useful too, but they are a bit harder to carry safely and also a bit more blatantly dangerous. (Many of the stabbings that neds do simply aren’t intended to kill or even badly injure, but because they don’t know how to fight with knives or any anatomy, things end up worse than expected)
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April 27, 2015 at 6:45 pm -
Well I didn’t know that ‘good’ meant length, but that is a bloke thing I suppose. The knife in question was a Swiss army model number I forget, but it had an obligatory saw. When I received it from the evil Amazon my thoughts were that it was a sharp as a razor & beautifully made – I never had anything like it as a child, though somehow we did all seem to end up with one of those ridiculously heavy built like a tank Brit army knives with straight blade, unusable can opener, and a massive curved spike. They had a kind of black chequered side plates.
Oh and yes, grandson did cut himself, several times, but he won’t forget grandpa gave him a knife. Nobody else was lining up to.
I still have a razor sharp Taylor lock blade myself, a gift which I occasionally use for it’s intended purpose, cutting a slice of biltong.
And while I think of knives; my first camping trip to France, ’70s with our indestructible Dyane, I brought back Opinels for the neighbour kids. It didn’t go down well then; can you imagine now?-
April 27, 2015 at 7:18 pm -
I seem to recall the spike was for the sole purpose of removing stones from horse’s hooves. That British Maanufacturing continued producing and selling a tool that nobody had needed for the previous thirty years says all that is needed about post-war Britain. Of course, in the event of an apocalypse, everyone with the ability to remove stones from horse’s hooves would have prospered.
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April 27, 2015 at 7:48 pm -
I’m sure you’re right Moor,
But none of this this can take a way the pleasure of giving a grandson an actual knife, which coupled with ‘Dad knows a lot, but Grandpa knows everything’ brings a glow to ones life.
A small & selfish pleasure, I know, like sharing all sorts of things we enjoyed in our long ago childhood.
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April 28, 2015 at 1:40 pm -
I went through a succession of pen knives when I was growing up in the 1970s, almost all bought by parents, or other relatives with parental permission. When my sister’s sons each got baptised, I gave them a reasonably-sized Victorinox for when they were old enough, of which both my sister and her husband heartily approved. Last time I was in Ireland I bought a small Opinel – it was like being eight all over again!
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April 27, 2015 at 7:54 pm -
‘neds’ Guthrie?
really?
Takes me back to my early ’70’s working in Springburn; formative.
http://FTP…….FKB……, mind your car for 50p mister? Or else!
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April 27, 2015 at 1:26 pm -
April 27, 2015 at 1:39 pm -
April 27, 2015 at 4:25 pm -
I have strong memories of the late 70’s and early 80’s post industrial decline. My Dad driving me through streets of boarded up and vandalised housing. You can see still these in Liverpool, Bradford, and a few other post industrial areas. Google ‘derelict UK houses’. The results are quite startling.
Yes, I too remember ‘Survivors’, but think I know what a disease depopulated country with no infrastructure would look like; because I’ve seen it in microcosm. Wasta est.
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April 27, 2015 at 4:27 pm -
“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing” (From Elizabeth Kolbert’s ‘Field Notes from a Catastrophe’).
So it would seem. But it’s perhaps some consolation to the philosophers amongst us that, although natural selection may have slipped up in creaing our species, it will no doubt have another go somewhere in this vast universe and eventually produce creatures with the same potential as homo sapiens but much more sense.
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April 27, 2015 at 11:12 pm -
Not sure I would want to be a survivor in that scenario ! I loved the series and have read all the John Wyndham books. I don’t think I would make a very good survivor, can’t think of any useful skills I could bring to the table. I think I was very lucky growing up when I did, all the relative security of the 50s as a child and the fun of being the first ‘teenagers’ in the 60s. I suppose humanity will muddle through somehow.
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April 28, 2015 at 8:35 am -
I’m not quite sure what this line is supposed to be about: “settling for the perpetual adolescence supported by a mother’s mollycoddling that ensures clothes are washed and dinner is served would be a drawback to survival”.
Does it perhaps concern the fact that a majority of people in their thirties can no longer afford to buy their own homes owing to the vast increase in house prices and the collapse in jobs with steady income and prospects? That is more like being forced into something than settling for it. In any case those of us who actually do know such people will be aware they are much more likely to be living in a shared house situation than back at home.
I also thought the line about ‘media studies’ (always good for a boo in the mainstream media) is a little unworthy. I would have thought a blog like this would think that we more and more need critical training and awareness concerning the media. Not, of course, that that should replace an education in literature and other high cultural forms.
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April 28, 2015 at 9:11 am -
re. Media Studies.
I recall seeing one commentator on the side of Icke and the Hunters commenting that there were many folk now who had done Media Studies courses and the Establishment wasn’t going to get away with “it” anymore. A whole generation could now see through the veil of deceit. It seems to be working quite well I must admit, given that the professional journalists seem even more deluded than the readers sometimes…
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April 28, 2015 at 9:23 am -
About 1995/6 I interviewed a young man from a town on the Thames, seawards of the QE bridge. He was in a state of emotional collapse. He had bought his one bed appartment for, lets us say 30k, and tried to sell on. He found it was worth 15K. He was in a strange new situation of negative equity. We had to send him away while we consulted our Insolency gurus who dealt expertly with debt. They were nearly as clueless as we were. Afterwards we saw people who had posted their keys through building society letter boxes. Not realising they could still owe money and would be haunted by debt collectors to settle up. It was late nineties before negative equity started to fade out. My mother once said they wanted to move about 1937 to a new build near a friend, from our newbuild of 1932. They could not do so, as the depression had reduced the price of our dolls house. There are different troubles for different eras. We never seem to learn from our mistakes. At least they had a place. Now you can’t even afford a broom cupboard. In roughly 17/18 years we suffer/allow soaring house prices….I wonder why?
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April 28, 2015 at 12:50 pm -
It’s very telling that when the BBC attempted to remake Survivor in 2008, the cack-handed results never really tackled the inevitable technological fall from grace in the way the original series did. That said, it also managed to not address even the basic premise of the original series that made it so watchable, i.e. actually attempting to create a post-Death community.
As for how detatched the Youth of Today are from the practicalities of technology, I recently watched in horror a piece on BBC Breakfast about schoolchildren (“Students”?! Pah) supposedly building a radio in class. Was this a crystal set, that wonderfully simple device of less than half a dozen components that can pull radio signals from the ether without even a battery attached ? Or was it a little more complex, like a crystal set with a transistor and battery attached to amplify the signal enough to drive a loudspeaker, rather than headphones? No, it was a Raspberry Pi computer hooked up to the schools wi-fi, so they could listen to radio via the internet. D’oh!
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April 28, 2015 at 1:27 pm -
It’s interesting that nobody has raised the issue of how such a TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) event would affect the considerable changes of womens status and roles in society (especially considering the massive changes over, in particular, the last forty years).
Whilst current technology and civilisation benefits all it is, arguably, considerably more to the benefit of women.
I (my budding Alzheimers to the fore again) can’t quite remember the particular novel I (mis)remember but in many such post-apocalyptic fictional stories (well at least when examined honestly) women immediately must seek a strong man/men to protect and provide for them and their children or face the dire consequences.
I foresee, god forbid such events occur, the re-division of labour, a return of status for men/fathers, and possibly even the emergence of some sort of formal relationship, a contract perhaps with a spiritual aspect coming to be a desired prospect. Hmm, we could call it matrimony/marriage you think?
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April 28, 2015 at 1:46 pm -
The Death of Grass, as filmed under the American title of No Blade of Grass with Nigel Davenport (with an eye patch)?
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April 28, 2015 at 4:15 pm -
Peter
I don’t think so but I have such a plethora of such stories (epub and dead-tree version – it’s a popular and growing topic after all, why that is is another discussion altogether). They appeal to my barbarian soul perhaps (or perhaps it’s the different perspective of examining what is occurring in our society by examining what would happen if … ?).
I wonder, should such events occur, will there be differences in how societies respond. That it will devolve to, initially, families aiding ‘their own’ is almost a certainty but just how will all those single young mothers cope? They survive currently based on the forced (by .gov) support/provision and protection of all men (70% of net tax payments are by men, the vast majority of producers and providers of essential services are men, and police and military rely on all men to do the actual heavy lifting rather than the equality PR aspects) rather than an individual husband/father. That won’t be an option in such a situation.
But will there be better scenarios in the traditionally high-trust societies (mostly western areas where you can ‘lend your neighbour your lawn-mower in the general belief you’ll get it back intact’) or in the wider-familial/tribal cultures (where ‘you can lend your lawn-mower but only assume to get it back if he’s your brother/cousin/uncle, otherwise you’ll be seen as a gullible idiot and never see it again)?Wider social ‘cooperative behaviour’ (think the spontaneous unconnected community barn-raising in the US) is not a common event away from the west … and will the obvious (to anyone who bothers to look, and because I’m a cynic I believe to be intentionally engineered) breakdown of this ‘community spirit’ (do you know your neighbours? Do you shovel snow from their part of the path?Would the self-organised street parties of the Silver Jubilee still occur in most places?) make a difference?
I’m both glad, as others have said, to have been born in an era of general peace and prosperity, well that and always being a believer in Heinleins statement:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
So I should be OK.
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