Between 1994 and 2004 I published reports on freedom, privacy and preparedness. A small crowd read them, people with no intention of handing their family’s wellbeing over to the state or the supermarket supply chain.
After that I went off into plants and foraging, and my foraging books have now sold over 70,000 copies.
I’ve come back to preparedness because of my daughter and my grandchildren. I wanted them to have a plain, sensible place to learn how to look after themselves when things go wrong, whether that’s the water going off for a few days or a week without power in January.
I built Safe Family for them and it’s dedicated to them. If it helps your family as well, you’re very welcome here.
I have no patience for bunker fantasies or people flogging overpriced buckets of freeze-dried slop. Most preparedness writing online is American, paranoid or both, and very little of it fits a terraced house in Exeter or a flat in Leeds.
What I’ve tried to write here is calm, practical guidance for UK households.
Some of it comes from my own experience. Some comes from evidence-based reports by people working in remote parts of the world, who report back on what actually works in an emergency.
The rest comes from how households coped before electricity and supermarkets. Back then, a well-kept larder and the knowledge to use it got a family through a hard winter.
You start small, with three days of water and food, and build from there, up to a year if you want to go that far.
Articles are categorised by water, food, cooking, power, communications, kits and guides, and there’s a getting started section if you’ve done nothing yet. Some links are affiliate links. I’ll only point you towards kit my family own or are considering after much research.
When something goes badly wrong, the council and the government won’t be at your door in the first few days, and I can’t be either. Put a bit by and learn how to use it.
And as the global Scout motto bangs on about, ‘Be prepared’.