Preparedness for when

[Deleted User]

Wyre wrote: »

Thanks Bedsit Bob, I shall do just that. You're a star!

Here you go. The exact page.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00D36R6BE/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

babyshoes

Wyre wrote: »

Argh postman has not long been, and he has brought me my new debit card. Fantastic, I needed it as the old one had been used sooo much it had worn the back through to the void strip. What I am not happy with is is that it is a contactless card! Any ideas how I can prevent myself accidently paying for stuff I had no intention of buying as it reads it twice or something?! *sighs* Why is life never easy?

What I did when mine arrived a few weeks ago was just phone the bank to say that I don't want the contactless technology. There was no quibble - they happily agreed to send me a new card without the contactless bit. Quick and painless, took less than 5 mins on the phone, and the new card arrived in days. I was able to use the contactless one in the meantime if necessary.

ginnyknit

Wyre I sent you a Pm wondering if it didnt arrive? I have my battery lamps and have had one of them running in a trial since Tuesday 12 pm and still going strong on £1 shop batteries. Very impressed and thank you for getting them for me Wyre

armyknife

GreyQueen wrote: »

Morning all.

Intersting and valid point, armyknife.

The Tudor period is generally accepted as being 1485-1603.

Interestingly, my Dad's researches into our (extended) family history has got back as far as the start of the 1600s. Realistically, we can't get back much further as the record-keeping for commoners like ourselves just isn't there.

In terms of health, life expectancy is used as a way of showing how far we've advanced from the Bad Old Days. If you pay attention, you'll hear a lot of nonsense about there being incredibly low life expectancies (30-40 years only) as little as 100 years ago. This is caused by ignorance, as in factoring infant deaths to the average, thus killing off the majority of people before early middle age.

In the early 1600s, tail end of the Tudor period, my relatives were dying in their early eighties and early nineties. In the twenty-first century, my relatives are also dying in their early eighties and early nineties.

So, in terms of health, if you factor out infant and child mortality due to communicable diseases now conquered or innoculated against, remove those female ancestors who died at, or shortly after childbirth, and you have a net gain in life expectancy of exactly zilch.

If you look at old records inc newspaper reports, you'll see a lot of people dying in accidents with horses and carts. Sometimes by being extremely drunk and being run over by their own cart, sometimes caused by accidents, such as the head injury from a horse-kick which killed one of my great-grandads at work in 1937. Very fit man, probably wired to live another 15-20 years but died after a few days in a coma aged 67. Perhaps modern medicine could have saved him whereas late-1930s medicine couldn't.

Most of the improvements in health aren't specifically attributable to medicine but can be squarely laid at the door of proper plumbing, sewage disposal and understanding about germs.

Given that even in the modern world, there seem to be plenty of people too lazy and ignorant to wash their hands after using the lavatory, can you imagine what would happen if, post SHTF, sanitation broke down? And break down it would.

You wouldn't need to wait for howling hordes of looters on motorcycles to come attack your homestead, or slow starvation as you ate your way through your stocks, you'd be in far more peril from water-borne diseases.

Isn't that a bit of a strawman, as I never mentioned life expectancy, neither did I imply that modern medicine was solely responsible for the health improvements seen around us in recent generations.

I merely pointed out, that it's all very well going back to some mythical golden age of simple rural living, but as soon as a serious medical emergency arrives, we'll be screaming for the NHS with all of it's 'expensive', energy intensive surgery and treatment.

GQ, haven't you yourself stated that you rely on specialist medicine to keep on living, so personally you couldn't actually hark back to that sort of size style?

Plus given this medicine is measurable extending your own life expectancy then it must follow, from your own personally, anecdotal experience that it's noticeably more than exactly zilch.

And my point about a sizeable proportion of us not making it to 16 years old seems valid, especially when compared to modern care means, what about 30 per 1000 babies die.

short_bird

BitterAndTwisted wrote: »

I heard that rationing of sweeties finally ended in 1954. I think it was one of the last things to go.

Hi, according to David Kynaston's Family Britain (an excellent book, just like the predecessor Auterity Britain), the date for sweets was... hang on... Feb 1953. Tea came off ration in Oct 52, so you can only imagine how many times the leaves got used.

JayneC

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

Piece of cake, on a rabbit.

Yeah I meant the deer.! Although would be good to have a go with rabbit. I've seen it done and looks like they're designed to be skinned lol.

AnimalTribe

Thanks for the warm welcome.
Bedsit Bob thanks too for the suggestion to include power cuts in my preps. I already have candles, torches and a supply of wood (as the boiler relies on electricity). It’s thanks to this forum that I’m doing OK with my preps (I think).
I know loads of you on this thread are animal lovers. I have a suggestion for an animal related prep. I hope it’s not out of place, but the thread goes so quickly I can’t keep up.
Every time I take my cats or dogs to the vets for their annual vaccinations I ask the vet to scan their microchip. It’s not part of the vet’s usual routine but they don’t charge me anything for it. I don’t remember why I started doing this but I am very glad I did. For one of my dogs the inexperienced vet couldn’t find her microchip, the experienced vet couldn’t find it either, but persevered because he knew it should be there. It turns out it had migrated a long way down her shoulder. If my dog had been lost she would have been scanned but no microchip would have shown up – she’d never get home to me.
I had the dog re-chipped after assurances from the vet that a second chip would do the dog no harm. Of course, this I did have to pay for. We did call the microchip database company who said it wouldn’t be a problem, if a thorough scanner found both chips, as both chips would just read with our details.

GreyQueen

Morning all.

AnimalTribe, that's a great suggestion about the microchip.

I work for a local authority and we do get called out to collect both stray dogs and also, very sadly, dogs and cats which have been reported as found dead. We'll scan the animal, dead or alive, for its microchip data.

Sometimes the animal won't be chipped or the chip may have been rendered unreadable (eg road traffic accidents) but if we can get the data we can contact the owner. It's joyous if we can re-unite a beloved pet with its owner, less good if all we can do is confirm their worst fears about their pet's fate, but it's an important thing to provide closure.

Ooh, and double check that you have ample means of lighting candles, lamps etc. I added another box of matches to the preps this week, as I'd taken a box of matches from the store into usage as one of the burners on my gas stove has decided that it won't respond to the automatic ignition any more, the cheeky monkey, and it's the most-used burner, too.

Well, it would be, wouldn't it?

pineapple

AnimalTribe wrote: »

Every time I take my cats or dogs to the vets for their annual vaccinations I ask the vet to scan their microchip. It’s not part of the vet’s usual routine but they don’t charge me anything for it. I don’t remember why I started doing this but I am very glad I did. For one of my dogs the inexperienced vet couldn’t find her microchip, the experienced vet couldn’t find it either, but persevered because he knew it should be there. It turns out it had migrated a long way down her shoulder. If my dog had been lost she would have been scanned but no microchip would have shown up – she’d never get home to me.

What an excellent point! Actually given my time again I would not microchip my dog again. There have been stories of these chips causing health problems. She has zero opportunity to go astray or get nabbed so in her case it's a pointless risk albeit a tiny one.

mardatha

Yea Armyknife but in my post I wasn't suggesting going back to Tudor times to live, only saying how amazing I found it that they could do so much without modern technology.
We didn't have Tudors up here - who did we have then? *brain hibernation*