Overlooked supplies

The parent page is a good list of the things generic lists miss. This adds the method for finding the one your household would miss, which no list can contain, and the fuel arithmetic behind its most ambitious item.

The audit that finds your own missing item

Every household has a supply nobody has thought about, and it is specific to that household. A particular medicine, a formula a baby will actually take, a pet food the cat will accept, a size of battery only one device uses, a specific thing that makes somebody's condition bearable.

No published list will name it, which is why the parent page's own list, however good, is not sufficient.

The audit takes an evening and works like this:

1. Walk the house room by room and write down anything that is consumed rather than kept. Not equipment: consumables.
2. For each one, ask what happens when it runs out and the shops cannot supply it for a month.
3. Mark the ones where the answer is genuinely bad, rather than merely inconvenient.
4. That short list is your real preparedness gap, and it is usually three or four items long and cheap to fix.

Then run the same audit on people rather than things. What does each person in the house need that nobody else in it needs? The answer is often a medicine, sometimes a piece of equipment, occasionally something that looks trivial and is not, like a particular comfort item for a small child.

The single best test is deprivation. Go without one thing for a week, deliberately, and find out what actually breaks. It is the same principle as the grid-down weekend, applied at the scale of a cupboard, and it is far more informative than reading a list.

Feet decide everything

The parent page puts footwear first and it is right to. In every long crisis, mobility is what decides whether a household can fetch water, reach help and get to anybody else, and feet are the failure point.

• Boots that are already broken in. New boots bought for an emergency are blisters in a box. Wear them now, on ordinary walks.
• Wool socks, six pairs each. Wool keeps a real share of its insulation when wet; cotton loses essentially all of it and then draws heat out of you. This is the same physics as the hypothermia page and it applies to feet first.
• Spare laces and insoles, which weigh nothing and cost almost nothing.
• A blister kit that you know how to use, and the discipline to stop and deal with a hot spot before it becomes a blister. Most people do not stop, which is why most people get blisters.
• Keep a pair of shoes by the bed, which is a fire-and-flood measure. Broken glass and cold floors are what stops people getting out of a house at night.

And a second pair per person, kept dry. Wet boots take days to dry with no heating, and a household with one pair each is a household that stops moving after the first wet day.

The mill needs a fuel plan

The grain mill is the most ambitious item on the parent page and its own note about cheap mills is honest. The gap is what happens after milling.

Wholegrain wheat keeps for decades and flour keeps for months, so a mill genuinely converts your longest-storing, cheapest calorie into something you can eat. That part is true.

Bread then needs sustained oven heat, which is the most expensive way to cook anything. A loaf is close to an hour at temperature, and if the fuel is wood you are burning a meaningful amount of it for one bake.

So learn flatbread first. It needs no oven, no tin, no proving to speak of, and it is what most of the world actually eats. The loaf is a Sunday project when there is fuel to spare.

And learn sourdough now, exactly as the parent says. A starter needs nothing but flour, water and patience, it is effectively immortal if fed, and it removes a purchased dependency entirely. Yeast in the freezer is the belt; sourdough is the braces, and it is free.

The items that are cheap now and unobtainable later

The parent page's underlying principle is that some things are trivially available today and cannot be improvised at all. Worth naming the ones where that gap is widest.

• Spare glasses. Order the cheap online pairs now. Somebody who cannot read cannot use any page in this app, and there is no substitute at any price later.
• Menstrual supplies, a year's worth, plus reusables. The parent page is right that this is among the most forgotten. A cup or washable pads remove the supply question permanently for the cost of a takeaway.
• Contraception. The parent page's reasoning is correct and worth stating plainly: a long crisis is precisely when an unplanned pregnancy carries the most risk, and it is the moment when maternity care is least available.
• Anything a baby in the house depends on. Formula in particular, because it cannot be improvised safely and a baby cannot wait.
• A manual tin opener, three of them. Comic until it isn't, as the parent says, and this is the single item most likely to be missing on the first evening.
• Reading glasses in several strengths. Cheap, and they turn a useless person into a functional one.

None of these are interesting, which is precisely why they get skipped for equipment that is.

The morale box is medical equipment

The parent page calls it that and it deserves the emphasis.

By the second week of a dark, cold, boring emergency, the limiting factor is not supplies. It is that everybody is miserable, frightened, under-occupied and getting on each other's nerves in one warm room.

• Paper books, cards, dice, a board game. No batteries, no screen, and they work by candlelight.
• Something for the children to make, because a child with a project is a child not absorbing everybody else's anxiety.
• An instrument, if anybody plays.
• Something that tastes good, rationed separately from food. Chocolate, coffee, a decent tea.
• A notebook and pens. For the log, for drawing, for children, and because writing things down helps people think.

This is the same argument the mindset companion makes about sleep. These are not comforts around the edge of the plan. They are what keeps the people executing the plan able to execute it, and twelve dark evenings in they are worth more than another sack of rice.