You know messing about with my fire making methods the other day in the comfort of my kitchen and failing I came to realise the majority of us are stuck in terms of coping if our modern age comes to an abrupt or even a slow stop as things are getting hard in the UK, poverty is becoming a real problem for many and many that fail to meet various criteria for state or charity aid, but without our modern conveniences we are well and truly stuffed.
Spurred by that thought I later read a rather interesting website on what faced the early pioneers in the colonisation of America the basic skill of creating a flame, making rush lights and tapersand there I realised centuries of knowhow has gone or at least is resigned to some quaint craft for some. But not is all lost there are the preppers who collect gadgets and objects just in case and with that feeding consumerism that is perhaps part of the problem with us, in that we don't need skills when there is a gadget that can be bought to do the job, but do the preppers realise modern conveniences have the nasty habit of running out, breaking and just plain not lasting, if an extended situation presents itself no amount of buying now just in case will help for long, then what will they do?
And so having previously failed to get a flame going in my kitchen with flint, steel, magnesium and char cloth, I knew despite what modern technologies we can apply in terms of processed flint and magnesium blocks it is the skill we need not what we can buy and of survival gadgets, perhaps what the past offered is a better option and so we would be better investing our time and money in rediscovering the past, learning how it was done and practice it, because without electricity and oil, two things essential to our modern lives and two things getting very expensive, there is not a lot we can do if we do not know how to obtain the necessaries from nature like our ancestors did.
As to the hypothetical survival situation, for many we are either in it or on the edges of it, especially so if Beechcroft's report is acted upon, mass unemployment we will be in a situation necessitating what we can do, not what we can buy and with that the past holds the clues to our future, long dead skills need to be revived and quick as industrialisation is but one of the events that has taken away centuries of skill and understanding, some stuff still used in the seventeenth century was later found out to have also been used by the Romans 1600 years previously, skills that stood the test of time because they worked.
But what of myself, well my failure to obtain a flame told me my old skills I was unpracticed in, I was annoyed with myself for I had become lazy and complacent and although in theory I could do a lot, without practicing that theory, that is all it will be and one is doubly damned. Much of what I know was from doing historical re enactment, living history, but I have not done that for gone ten years and I am that out of practice, I need to pull my finger out I think.
Spurred by that thought I later read a rather interesting website on what faced the early pioneers in the colonisation of America the basic skill of creating a flame, making rush lights and tapersand there I realised centuries of knowhow has gone or at least is resigned to some quaint craft for some. But not is all lost there are the preppers who collect gadgets and objects just in case and with that feeding consumerism that is perhaps part of the problem with us, in that we don't need skills when there is a gadget that can be bought to do the job, but do the preppers realise modern conveniences have the nasty habit of running out, breaking and just plain not lasting, if an extended situation presents itself no amount of buying now just in case will help for long, then what will they do?
And so having previously failed to get a flame going in my kitchen with flint, steel, magnesium and char cloth, I knew despite what modern technologies we can apply in terms of processed flint and magnesium blocks it is the skill we need not what we can buy and of survival gadgets, perhaps what the past offered is a better option and so we would be better investing our time and money in rediscovering the past, learning how it was done and practice it, because without electricity and oil, two things essential to our modern lives and two things getting very expensive, there is not a lot we can do if we do not know how to obtain the necessaries from nature like our ancestors did.
As to the hypothetical survival situation, for many we are either in it or on the edges of it, especially so if Beechcroft's report is acted upon, mass unemployment we will be in a situation necessitating what we can do, not what we can buy and with that the past holds the clues to our future, long dead skills need to be revived and quick as industrialisation is but one of the events that has taken away centuries of skill and understanding, some stuff still used in the seventeenth century was later found out to have also been used by the Romans 1600 years previously, skills that stood the test of time because they worked.
But what of myself, well my failure to obtain a flame told me my old skills I was unpracticed in, I was annoyed with myself for I had become lazy and complacent and although in theory I could do a lot, without practicing that theory, that is all it will be and one is doubly damned. Much of what I know was from doing historical re enactment, living history, but I have not done that for gone ten years and I am that out of practice, I need to pull my finger out I think.
