All we all doomsday preppers now?

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🍸 Should we all be prepping for Doomsday? There’s long been a community of people preparing for armageddon: installing elaborate (and expensive) bunkers, learning survival skills for when all the lights go out.

But you may also find, chatting in the pub or at work, that more people are taking seriously some recent government advice, made oddly sotto voce earlier this year, that we might want to consider stocking up on essentials Just In Case. Telegraph columnist Helen MacNamara stated this week that “prepping has become the norm”. A large minority of the UK population has a bleak view of the country’s preparedness for bad weather, cyberattack or worse, she notes.

Lauren Wilkin and Ewan Mowat have been speaking to one Scottish dad who’s splashed out £6,000 this year alone - on top of thousands in recent years - building a shelter full of tins of food, power banks and night vision goggles. He says one winter of bad weather around his home, between Glasgow and Stirling, convinced him he needed to be better prepared; he felt bad his kids didn’t have enough food in the house during that scare. Things grew from there.

Brian Forbes, who analyses risk for his job, reckons it’s worth the effort and expense, and sees particular stress in the power grid these days. “I don't see a fix in the near future,” he says.

“There is conflict all over the world and there has been since I was born. Other countries' problems can be our problems too. Now we're seeing an increase in fuel, and a bad crop yield because of the weather we've had.

"But as far as bombs dropping from the sky any time soon, I can't prep for things I can't do anything about. I think [thoughts of] zombie apocalypse and tinfoil hats are just nonsensical."

As for his kids? Well, they think he’s lost his mind, of course. "They think dad's nuts, dad’s crazy, he's lost his marbles,” says Brian. “I may well be wrong but it's ultimately my money and time,” he says.

This stuff isn’t cheap - just consider one (of many) lists of items posted online that detail what you might want to buy to survive - say - a big cyberattack on the power grid, or financial system. Brian’s spending might even seem quite reasonable in this worried world.

What is this - rational risk mitigation, or an overreaction (even a selfish, rather libertarian reaction) to an uncertain world? You decide. I know I feel woefully underprepared: if the internet went down, I suspect I’d starve in days. So I’ll be over there, looking at beans in the tinned goods aisle, while you think about it.

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