Preparedness for when

ALIBOBSY

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

ALI I add to the list a SOLAR CHARGER for recharging kindles and phones and I.Pods we have one, it really works well on the phones and His I.Pod have just asked him about the kindle and he says you'd probably have to top up the kindle every day but it would enable it to stay charged enough to be read. I think our small charger was well under £10 to buy. Cheers Lyn xxx.

Yep this is definitely on my wish list as well as one of those john lewis windup/solar radios and if I had the cash one of those powertrek things that can charge a phone from just water and/or one of those stoves that has a charger attached.


Ali x

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

I must admit, when I first became aware of satnav, I thought Nah, that'll never catch on, people aren't that stupid.

Having had a navigator who managed to get us to Wales rather than Essex, I use Satnav, though also carry a road atlas and OS maps (and can use them)

In a SHTF situation, maps are going to be golden. Especially given the modern habit of tweaking road signs out in the countryside to send you thru/ past a particular village or town. If I'm walking or biking, I don't want to be sent the pretty way around, I want and need the shortest route from A to B.

Its not just a new habit, I remember finding signs all over Durham pointing to Stanhope and saying either 10 or 15 miles - usually 10 or 15 miles since the last sign saying the same.

I don't need maps anywhere within a 15 mile radius of my hometown as I grew up biking all over those roads and I worked as a delivery driver for the best part of a year there as an adult and have gone all over the area. I loved the sense of being out and about and the fact that me and mine knew what was happening all over the area we covered. Or the bits that were visible from the road anyway.

I recently ended up in the vicinity of the village I grew up in and thought I knew the area intimately having cycled it for years and learned to drive there. There's a new road network with a pair of bypasses and several road closures, I couldn't find a way into the village - On checking new maps I've worked out what they've done, a reminder that roads change and maps go out of date.

siegemode wrote: »

Hi,
Have found some ys salmon fillets that I froze on 10th April last year and I've got them defrosting on the side for tea. I'm a little unsure if they are ok to eat, what do you recon ?
They are in vacuum type packaging. I feel apprehensive and don't want to poison oh ! after all he's not insured and worth more to me alive

Thanks

As long as the salmon smells ok when you open the vac pack I'd use it.

GreyQueen

There aren't too many changes in the hinterlands around my native villages, just the odd bypass. Most of the roads are twisty turny cart tracks which got tarmacked in the twentieth century and lost their hedgerows but otherwise are unchanged from many moons ago.

It always amuses me to see them zigzagging and wonder what they used to zag around? A large tree? A horsepond? Nothing on the ground to explain it now.

When we go over the backroads from the hometown to my Nan's, it's a bit folkloric. I see things which aren't there anymore, and were never there in my lifetime, but which my Dad and Grandad told me about. Such as that stripe of darker soil along the stream at the bottom of that sloping field. Used to be osier beds where the gypsies would nick the willow for their basketmaking.

See that empty bit there? Used to be an old black barn, had stood for centuries, all gone 50 years ago. We go down a back lane where one of my gread-grands had his smallholding. Dad went there lots to visit as a boy. GGD kept a few pigs down there, used to hang about jawing. Used to go to the auction sales and come back with loads of old tott. Nothing at all left of the smallholding, it's an undifferentiated corner of what is now a huge field.

We go thru another village and nod at the huge brick shed where Dad used to keep his tractor, and wonder if the people in that 1970s bungalow know that it is built on top of a big pit of anthrax-killed cattle from the early twentieth century? Local people wouldn't dream of buying it.

I've biked and driven across that part of England for so many years, seeing things which aren't there and never were in my lifetime. Caught myself giving someone directions the other day to turn left under the footbridge which isn't there any more. It stood for 40 years, local people know what I mean.....:rotfl:

The map just isn't the land, the paper, the ink, it's sometimes the heart, the head, the imagination..........

And the savvy not to live on top of a biohazard........of course.

the_cake

Thought-provoking and fascinating posts as usual, thank you all.
Just to bring things down to earth: Jeeves' donation today was a small frog, brought into the sitting room and then abandoned. I rescued it using the glass-over-the-top-and-card-underneath technique, took it outside and released it gently in a damp patch. Was moved to see it had its little "hands" over its eyes, poor thing. Relieved that it had disappeared five minutes later. Jeeves is now purring on the sofa, looking as if butter wouldn't melt ... perhaps in a SHTF situation I could just send him out hunting, but I think our diet might be a little erratic. Then again, I could always make myself some moleskin knickers, couldn't I? (Or a voleskin thong?!!) Could be cosy for the winter!

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

The map just isn't the land, the paper, the ink, it's sometimes the heart, the head, the imagination..........

And the savvy not to live on top of a biohazard........of course.

Very well said.
Many's the evening I've pored over OS maps, remembering climbs and treks, remembering tales told by family and friends.
I know the bends where three generations of the same family managed to leave the road and, leaving their motorbikes in the wall, ended up with close encounters with bulls. I was up there last summer with the latest generation of that family wondering if the bulls happened to be related.
I know of two plague pits that lived on in children's games and stories, long forgotten by the adult world, until houses were demolished for redevelopment and human remains were found by diggers.

GreyQueen

I think that going over your native patch, your ain countree, however you choose to describe it, is a bit like beating the bounds in olden times, but done consensually and without the beatings to reinforce the local knowledge.

We go here and there, and nod at houses which stood for a couple of hundred years before our family lived in them, and will probably stand for another couple of hundred after. We mooch around the outside of a 17th century farmhouse, rotting devoid of its farmland down a dank lane, last owned by our kin in the 1920s. It has a Grade II listing and was bliddy cold and damp, family lore says.

Another village, hamlet really, has a lovely large farmhouse which is an expensive B & B. 45 years ago it was semi-derelict. My auntie and uncle raised their kids there for a few years on the ground floor; the upper floor was derelict, too unsafe to enter and rat-infested. Private rent; boy. were they made up to get a council house two villages over.......

See the village churchyard? There are the family graves which have stones and there are the family graves which didn't, because people were too poor. See that pointed iron railing which auntie fell onto as a girl when climbing the gate and ended up with a deep and painful wound in her buttock. Dad points out a field, still draining just fine, which he and another teen farm-boy put a land-drain into in the 1950s to cure a boggy section in the middle.......it goes on.

Y'see, you can move into an area, you can be a keen student of local history, but you'll never hear those stories since childhood and have the depth of knowledge that the local person whose family has been there for centuries will have.

Sadly, it's drifting away, as "our" villages become dormitories for affluent retirees and the locals like me have moved into the towns and the cities for work. You need a quarter million, minimum, to have a peasant hovel where I hail from............

Small story from the extended family.

One of my grandads was one of the last to plough with horses in this (admitedly backwards) region, at the cusp of the 1960s. A journalist and photographer from the regional paper were sent out to capture this archaic image before it vanished entirely (we have the prints of the photo). After the pix were done, young journalist burbled on to Grandad about how wonderful it must be to be outside all day in the fresh air, the trees etc etc.

He was given a real old-fashioned countryman's look from under the brim of a flat cap as Grandad muttered that he'd been looking at bliddy trees all his life........ Mum was there at the time and said that the way he said it was a caution.

JayneC

Hello all,

I've been reading along but not posting as DS has been hogging the 'pooter and I've been relegated to my mobile, which is a PITA to type on. But he's not in tonight so its all mine:D

:(I think its inevitable that we're going to have some powercuts so we are going to have to adapt somehow. People in the know already know this and some (that I know of) are prepared... I thought the article was a bit sneaky, obviously trying to use it to promote nuclear power stations. The part about nuclear providing a higher percentage of power in 1997 than presently as if the Labour govt have been building coal powered stations instead only to be closed down?? I don't recall that! It''s because there's more renewbles of course but they're more efficient on a local level so the big companies don't want them as it's more difficult to distribute widely. Local distribution of power is more efficient but it means the big corporations will have to give up control, which they won't do of course and so we'll have to suffer... I heard a whisper that part of the reason the solar scheme was halted was because the grid couldn't actually cope with the extra power generated so it's the grid that needs sorting, building more power stations won't solve that problem.

I don't have many gadgets, never been a gadget kind of person really - probably due to the fact that I'm poor . But I was making fairy cakes with DGS a few days ago and got out my electric hand mixer (after having dumped all of the ingredients together in the mixing bowl) and nothing..... not a grunt or a whizz, nothing....So had to resort to the trusty wooden spoon and you know what, it wasn't that much work and the cakes were the nicest I've made in a long time:) Now I know this doesn't compare to losing months worth of meat if your freezer dies, but its something:p

In my news of the week, I've just picked up someone else's SHTF moment . One of DS friends (15yo) has had a bit of a turbulent home-life and his mother has refused to have him home, so after the lad has spent the past couple of weeks sofa surfing, he's come to live with us indefinitely...I think the lad himself will be fine its his entourage of 'support workers' that'll probably do my head in! Wish me luck!

Jx

Winged_one

I haven't been around much recently (work blocked MSE and home life has been manic). But while DD plays with friends outside after round 1 of takeaway dinner, I am browsing while I eat mine.

We do have a lot of modern tech etc, but we also do a lot of OS things and have options. We have a combi gas ring/electric oven cooker, as well as gas BBQ (which has been used in snow), microwave, slowcooker and open fire. We have lots of nightlights and candles (and holders for them), and a few wind up lanterns and torches as well as electric light.

While we enjoy playing DS's and Wii, and watching tv/netflix or surfing the net for entertainment, that's not all there is. DD enjoys getting out the draughts and chessboard, various different board games, jigsaws, and we have loads of different games to play with a regular pack of cards too. And a well stocked bookcase.

What we've found on occasions where we've had to do something to deal with an unexpected emergency, it has helped if DD knows something about how to use or entertain herself with what the available options are. So we don't just produce the tricky jigsaw on a rainy night when the power is gone, but on a regular basis to work on together.

And that she knows how to use torches, or to be safe around candles etc.

It's probably already been said upthread, but worth mentioning I thought.

[Deleted User]

JAYNE you are a good and compassionate woman, it cannot be easy living with one 15 year old in the house, two? well it's a wonderful and warm person that lets a waif and stray stay indefinately, you are an example to us all, hats off to you for your kindness and good luck too, I hope it all works well for both your family and the very lucky lad who will have a home because of your actions, that's one that makes the world a much better place, Cheers Lyn xxx.

RAS

nuatha wrote: »

Very well said.
Many's the evening I've pored over OS maps, remembering climbs and treks, remembering tales told by family and friends.
I know the bends where three generations of the same family managed to leave the road and, leaving their motorbikes in the wall, ended up with close encounters with bulls. I was up there last summer with the latest generation of that family wondering if the bulls happened to be related.
I know of two plague pits that lived on in children's games and stories, long forgotten by the adult world, until houses were demolished for redevelopment and human remains were found by diggers.

When old local maps were displayed, we could suddenly see the outlines of old farms and fields, still recorded on the ground in the stone walls that separate blocks of housing (and some land) built in the 19C. The cherry orchard may not yield any cherries now but is still gardened today; the 15/16C farmhouse now butt end to the main road and the monastic track leading to the local grange.

Even more so in the lands of my childhood. I can walk a few yards to the west of a major walking route and find a medieval field system and settlement. When I step up onto the higher ground of the house platforms, the major walking route winds its way neatly along the original village street; a full six centuries after the place was abandoned. There is a song in that track.

I carry a compass but rarely use it; I read the map before I start and then walk with the occasional check (or drive). I know where south is at all times and orientate to that whether I am on foot or in a vehicle. I adjust a bit west or a bit north, so even if I have to move off the main road I can still wrangle my way round the obstruction. if I do not know where south is, I start to worry and that is when I would pull out a map to check the lie of the land.

I hate sat navs.

PS - DS lives in the land of narrow walled hollow ways and narrow bridges with sharp right bends. Sat navs do strange things to lorry drivers and the odd coach driver who manages to wedge their vehicles fast between the road sides. It is a 25 mile trek to get round them whilst something very big comes out to drag them backward for miles.