The end times.

What's in your go-bag?

Jeanette Winterson, author of one of my favourite books, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, has a newsletter (just like everybody else, ha!) here on Substack and this week it is about prepping for the end times¹.

Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did. “We are in a vortex of hatred,” writes Winterson. It is terrifying and heartbreaking and unsteadying. It all smacks of the apocalypse, of building bunkers, and stocking up on batteries, and each man for himself. But will that be of any help, really? What are you surviving for? I certainly don’t want my brain put in a jar ready to be revived and put online when we have the chance of a digital ever-lasting consciousness if there is only awfulness to endure.

So, how are you prepping for the end times? What are you stocking up on? What’s in your go-bag?

‘I have food and medical supplies,’ writes Winterson, …

… Water purifying tablets and plenty of torch batteries. A few nice solar lanterns. I always have candles and firewood. The wind-up solar radio is cute. A 2G phone is cheap. I will do what I can. I roamed around the prepper sites when I was researching my book on AI - because prepping and religious end-time are plaited together, just as Big Tech and prepping go arm in arm. What you don’t see on those sites is anything that will help the heart, the mind, or the soul, survive. There’s nothing about about a book of poems or your favourite novel in the grab-bag. No tiny sketch pad. A mouth organ. Plenty about crossbows.

This is astoundingly true and something I’ve never thought about. In truth I’ve never really thought of a go-bag, or a bunker or stockpiling. Preppers were to be resolutely mocked, was my take. But it is an interesting thing to ask yourself? What do you consider essential? What will be available inside your mind - the ultimate go-bag? And the answer is the same as it was hundreds of years ago: stories, they will always be available, if we remember how to tell them.

If the power is off, you can’t watch Netflix but you can read by whatever light is available. You can write if you have a notebook and pens. You can draw. You can tell stories to your family, or if you are alone, to your dog. Or to yourself. But that depends on knowing some stories to tell.

She goes on:

At events I do, I encourage the audience to reflect on what stories they know by heart - whether it’s fairy tales or ghost stories, adventures from history, discoveries from science, anything that unfastens the mind from where it’s stuck in time. Anything that draws resource from inside, rather than waiting to be entertained.

One thing (amongst many others) growing up in a religious community (topic of my forthcoming book!) gave me was stories on tap. And songs. The Bible is a treasure trove of literary devices. Poetry, narrative, law, prophecy, parable. Its language is symbolic, layered, and often ambiguous, inviting interpretation. Beyond its religious significance, it has shaped Western literature profoundly, offering archetypes, themes, and moral questions that resonate across cultures and centuries.

I am very grateful for this grounding, because as Armageddon approaches, I have some real content to ponder.

At present we have terrible world news all day every day. It’s important to be informed. Important to read good journalism, opinion, comment, from a range of thinkers, whether or not we wholly agree with their views. But it’s just as important to read for pleasure. To go to the theatre if we can, see a band, to listen to music, take that walk and get some air, instead of doomscrolling on your phone. Think of this as prepping.

Amen. I have found my prepping community and it is about art galleries and book clubs.

You are preparing your mind and your spirit to withstand difficulty and loss. Hardship and sadness. You are building inner resources to manage life when it becomes unmanageable on the outside. Even if the world were not in this state, our own lives are unpredictable. We lose friends, lose jobs, lose lovers, the money suddenly vanishes. The kids leave home. Are we prepared? How can we prepare?

Her argument, if it is not already abundantly clear, is that while we need some concrete stuff, we also need to feather the nest of our souls. Have a rainy day poem jar.

Wise advice tells us to keep some savings, learn new skills, make sure we have friends. That’s all good. Not often are we encouraged to read a poem every day. To plan our reading list for the month ahead so we have something to look forward to. To listen to music, not as background but as meditation - might just be for 10 mins a day. To decide to draw a tree, and do that every day until we learn to draw a tree. To go to a gallery, because it’s free, and to look at one or two things only, and carry them in your minds for the rest of the week.

These are the things that will sustain us, that ‘build up resilience.

If we are going to survive whatever is coming towards us in this world, if we want to help others - and helping others is a duty as a well as a joy, as all religions tell us, (but the religios aren’t reading those bits right now) Anyway, to be this person, this person with compassion and values, we need more than cash in the sock drawer and extra tins of tomatoes. Humans are hybrids. Of course we have to be practical and manage our outer life. But if we have no inner life we won’t last long. Covid lock-downs showed millions of people that without the outside world they had nothing in their lives...If we are only outward facing we will not manage bad times or solitude. We won’t help ourselves and we won’t be able to help others.

So now is the time to prep. Store up the riches in your heart, so when the time comes you have something to draw on.

My husband and I have been having a conversation about fast food vs high quality information diets. The way people share ideas these days is by forwarding an instagram reel. It is the McDonald’s diet of inspiration, ironically enough often telling us what is wrong with our actual processed diet. But the information we eat is also processed. It is the plastic yellow cheese of thought. If we are to prep well for the end, or even just life, we need some high quality foods in our diet.

The list of books Winterson says she’ll take with her, she has chosen because they are “high calorie energy-dense reads”. They will sustain her mind in times of scarcity.

We should be doing the same.

So, whats in your metaphorical and actual bag? I had to really give this some thought. And I came up with the following:

1. George Eliot’s Middlemarch²

2. Pencils and notebooks

3. Small set of watercolours

4. The Bible

5. The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis³

6. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit⁴

7. I have two small special blankets that I bought while pregnant with my kids. I would take those. For warmth and sentimentality.

8. Snapdragon and Nasturtium seeds.

9. Earl Grey tea bags, olive oil, salt and chilli.

10. A few precious photos of friends and family to be used as bookmarks.

What is in yours?

x

1. You can read it here:

The World and other Places.

2. George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" (Goodreads).

3. The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven portal fantasy novels by British author C. S. Lewis. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes and originally published between 1950 and 1956, the series is set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals. It narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the Narnian world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protagonists are all children from the real world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are sometimes called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician's Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle. (Wikipedia)

4. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) traces the development of human consciousness from immediate sense experience to absolute knowledge. It is not a summary of facts or doctrines, but a dialectical journey that consciousness undergoes as it comes to understand itself and reality. The book begins with sense-certainty—the belief that truth is found in immediate experience—and moves through various stages like perception, understanding, self-consciousness, and reason. Along the way, Hegel explores relationships such as the famous master-slave dialectic, showing how self-consciousness depends on recognition by another.

Each stage contains contradictions that compel movement to a more developed form of consciousness. This dialectical process—where a thesis confronts its antithesis and results in a synthesis—underpins the whole text. Eventually, consciousness reaches the stage of Spirit, where it recognizes that the individual and the collective (society, culture, history) are mutually constitutive. The final destination is absolute knowing, where the subject realizes that reality is not something external but shaped by the process of knowing itself.

Rather than offering a fixed system, Hegel’s work dramatizes thought as a living, historical process. It remains foundational in philosophy, influencing existentialism, Marxism, and post-structuralism for its account of subjectivity, freedom, and historical becoming (ChatGPT).