By now I’m sure you’ve received this long-awaited booklet in the post.

Oh joy of joys the government are going to advise us on how to cope and how to prepare for an emergency.

The phrase ‘The Emergency’ for those of us who are students of history bring us directly into the mindset of a war footing and ration books, but let us not be overly dramatic. 

The criticism online about this booklet is widespread.

References to a previous freebie, namely the iodine tablets from the wise ones all the way up in Dublin, are headlining many a commentary.

I still have mine in the strange memory box under the stairs.

Someday they’ll be used to entertain my grandchildren with tales of ‘the olden days’ before we became slaves to our AI overlords, or when we finally woke up and took our world back. 

Either way it’s a prop to be used when talking about the near misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis and events that we barely survived, like Charlie Haugheys tenure.

That’ll surely give the little one’s nightmares.

I digress…

The booklet has arrived and is written in both English and Irish so you can’t complain, and to be fair I think it’s a worthy addition to the light reading collection on the coffee table.

Nowhere in it, and I’ve read it, does it mention aliens coming down from Mars to annihilate us, nor does it mention a zombie apocalypse that might turn us all into extras from The Walking Dead. 

Nowhere could I find a mention of the Russians arriving into Baltimore harbour to snip the phone lines or mutants on the N22 with lasers.

What I found was fairly harmless advice on how to invest in a torch or two, have a supply of batteries, the same advice you’d offer at Christmas for the toys arriving from Santa.

It mentions holding back some dry goods and having warm clothing or sleeping bags in an emergency.

Somehow this harmless advice, has been perceived as scare mongering by some.

For those of us who have lived through a period of seven days with no electricity let me tell you that the government did miss a trick while drafting this booklet by not talking to those of us that endured and survived this most difficult of times. 

It was a few years ago, but it still lives with me in moments of dark reflection.

If you live in an estate or near a hospital your electricity is normally repaired and restored quickly but for those of us who live in the back arse of nowhere, we were left to our own devices for a full week like some sort of reality tv experiment on how long you can survive in the same house as a teenager with no Wi-Fi. 

Day one was filled with a sense of determination; we will thrive in this environment I told myself.

I gathered candles and torches and made a meal plan for two days, after all it can’t go on for longer than that, right?

By day three, every second word uttered began with the letter ‘F’ and the sound of one another breathing was beginning to grate.

By day four the dog was going around in circles, board games had been flung at the wall, the hat from the monopoly game embedded in the drywall. 

By day five my son left as life without WiFi was not worth living, he said.

We wished each other well and hoped our paths would cross again in the future.

I stayed, for the dog’s sake. 

By day six a sense of peace descended over me as I was no longer obliged to entertain anyone and was only responsible for my own sanity.

I read, I ventured to the shop to get ‘supplies’, had breakfast somewhere to charge my phone and retreated back into my own little world before the sun went down. 

By day seven I was starting to grunt instead of making full sentences, personal hygiene was taking a back seat, I began to stare into the middle distance for questionable lengths of time.

The dog was giving me a wide berth.

The real world held no interest for me anymore.

Day eight and the power came back, along with all the unnecessary noise that entails and saved me from dipping my toe into the sea of insanity. 

So, if I was asked to contribute to the booklet on how to handle life with no power, I would suggest making a list of the projects you want to do but never found the time, like painting or wallpapering a wall, set aside a book you want to read, get your DIY kit ready, plan a proper declutter. 

You can look at this booklet as a portent of doom, or you do the sensible thing and see it as a piece of simple advice in the event of a disruption to normal service, God knows we need more of that.