About Me
There’s a particular kind of person the preparedness – or ‘prepper’ – world doesn’t really cater for: not wealthy enough to buy their way out of difficulty; not rurally self-sufficient; not interested in bunkers or the peculiarly American fantasy of surviving the zombie apocalypse or civilisational collapse with enough ammo and freeze-dried food to outlast everyone else… Just an ordinary person, in an ordinary home, who’s come to realise that life’s neither as stable or predictable as we’ve been led to believe it ‘should’ be, and who wants to do something genuinely useful about it.
That’s the person I built Hard Times Ready for. And I know that person pretty well, because for most of my adult life, that person has been me.
I’m Sally. I live in Bristol, and I’ve been thinking seriously about systemic fragility – the ways the systems ordinary people like us depend on can and do fail, and what that means for people living ordinary lives – for over twenty years. Not as some kind of doomsday obsession, but as a framework for living that grew out of something painful and became, in time, one of the most practically useful things I’ve ever done.
I was a kid in the seventies. I remember the power cuts – candles round the house, my dad home more than usual because of the three-day week, no street lights on outside. It felt exciting when I was a kid. What it left behind was something different: a bone-deep understanding that the basics we rely on can disappear without warning. That’s always stayed with me.