Now, you may call this a First World problem, but when Petworth runs dry of line-caught tuna, the writing is on the wall. For all I know, it will be sourdough next and then, when the Levin Down ewe’s cheese goes, those same walls will come tumbling down altogether.
We live in interesting times, which is precisely what some Chinese philosopher told us not to live in. It turns out that all those years when I thought I was bored and spoiled, I was, in fact, exquisitely happy.
Back in 1906, an American investigative journalist called Alfred Henry Lewis came up with the notion that, in any society, there are around nine meals between mankind and anarchy. The nine meals were the time it would take between a serious disruption to the food supply and a total break down of law and order.
In a slightly more readable version of the same thought, in an 2010 Guardian article, Andrew Simms articulated the notion for a modern audience. We may love our neighbour to bits, was the gist of what he said, but if our children haven’t eaten for three days, if our neighbour is carrying a loaf of bread and if we have a gun, that love kind of goes out the window. ‘Sorry, my friend’, we say, ‘but I’m having that bread’.
The closest first world example I can come up with to back up Lewis’ theory is in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where the scenes of aggressive-self-help-and-stuff-the-others might have had Priti Patel licking her lips a bit. Apparently, it wasn’t at all nice.
Over the last week, we have seen what happens when 30 million motorists suddenly develop the inkling that they might not be able to fill up their cars at exactly the moment they want to. Entirely rationally (as an individual) they decide to do it straight away, just in case, and entirely irrationally (as a society) the pumps run dry and we run out of fuel, when there are tens of thousands of cubic metres of the stuff swilling around the country. My local town is full of men of a certain age queueing up for forty minutes to squeeze another £5.42 of lead-free in their tanks ‘just to be on the safe side’, whilst the nurses and care workers who were too busy to queue dust off their old bicycles and cycle off to work.
This is, of course, dominantly because we have decided to run our economies on the ‘just in time’ basis, where a loaf of bread arrives in the supermarket around 48 minutes before it will, on average, be bought, and where a widget for your new electric car only arrives in the factory the evening before it is due to be applied. The problem arises when ‘just in time’ meets ‘just in case’, and the walls come tumbling down.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that we are going to be regularly short of certain foods this winter. With 40% of it trying to come to us in trucks that don’t have enough drivers, fuelled by diesel that doesn’t have enough stock, and through ports in a country that currently actively dislikes us, things will stop coming through with their normal insouciant ease. And, we are regularly going to be short of electricity, too, because, er, we haven’t got any facility to store gas, we forgot to replace our old nuclear power stations and, for some reason, the wind has stopped blowing for the last three months.
As I hope you would by now expect, I have a plan.
That plan consists largely of running out of things and just seeing what happens. With the proviso of keeping enough fuel in the car to do an emergency run somewhere should the need arise, I am going to bring the back of the larder into play, along with hedgerows, bicycles, and windfall. This will make me happier, fitter and, above all, more smug.
Obviously, if anyone finds line-caught tuna, feel free to give me a shout.
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