Hello, I’m Rebecca 👋

Last winter, the power went out at our house in East Sussex during a storm. It stayed out for most of an evening.

We were fine. We were also completely unprepared, in the ordinary way that most families are. One torch with tired batteries. A cupboard full of food that all needed cooking. No idea who to ring or where the fuse box actually was. My daughter thought it was brilliant. I did not.

So I did the thing I always do, which is go and read everything.

The prep internet is split into two camps, and neither of them is talking to a normal family.

The first camp is frightening on purpose. Everything is a countdown to collapse, every article assumes society is three days from ending, and the underlying message is that if you aren’t scared enough you aren’t taking it seriously. That is not information. That is a mood, and it is a mood I already have plenty of.

The second camp is trying to sell you a bunker. Or a year of freeze-dried stroganoff. Or a water filter designed for drinking out of a Kenyan river, which is an odd purchase for someone in East Sussex.

Meanwhile the actual UK government guidance sat quietly on a website almost nobody had visited, being calm and sensible and not telling anyone how much water to buy.

There was nothing in the middle. Nothing that said: here is what to do, here is how much, it will take an afternoon, and then you can stop thinking about it.

So I built it.

Here is where the anxiety and the autism stop being a caveat and start being the actual product.

I do not find lists tedious. I find them soothing. Working out exactly how many litres of water a family of four needs for three days, and then checking it, and then checking it again, and then working out how many two-litre bottles that is and whether they fit in the cupboard under the stairs, is genuinely how I calm down.

Most people don’t want to do that. Most people want somebody else to have done it, properly, so they can look at the answer and get on with their day.

That is the entire job of this website. I do the obsessive bit. You get the list.

The kit builder on the front page is the same thing in tool form. Tell it who lives in your house, how old they are, whether there’s a dog or a baby or someone who can’t eat gluten, and it works out your list. No guessing, no doing sums on the back of an envelope in the dark.

We won’t frighten you. Not as a technique, not for clicks, not even a little bit. If a page on this site makes your chest tight, I have failed at my own brief and I would like you to tell me.

We stick to what’s actually likely. Storms, power cuts, floods, burst mains, a few days of disruption. That is what happens in Britain. We are not going to talk about societal collapse because it isn’t useful and it isn’t kind.

We tell you when not to buy something. There is a lot of prep tat. Where the honest answer is “you already own this” or “you don’t need one”, that is what we will say.

We follow the official guidance. Everything here is built on what the UK government’s Prepare campaign actually recommends, plus fire service and water company advice. We are not affiliated with any of them and nobody in government has approved a single thing we suggest.

Honestly, because you should know.

When we link to a product, it is usually an Amazon link, and if you buy through it we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That is how the site pays for itself.

It does not change what we recommend. It particularly does not change the pages where we tell you to buy nothing. If a wind-up torch is the right answer, we say wind-up torch, and if you already have one in a drawer then the right answer is to go and check the drawer.

If you are here because you are anxious, I want to say something that most prep sites won’t.

Preparing helps most people feel better. It gave me somewhere to put the worry, and once the box was in the cupboard I genuinely stopped thinking about it.

But for some of us, it can go the other way. The list gets longer, the scenarios get bigger, and it stops being preparation and starts being the anxiety wearing a high-vis jacket. If that starts happening, the answer is not more supplies.

Build the basic kit. Put it in the cupboard. Then close the laptop and go and do something else. That is what finished looks like, and you are allowed to be finished.