Skills calendar

The page above is the best value in the whole playbook, because practice is what converts a cupboard of kit into a household that can act. It is also the page most likely to be read and not done, so this one is about the doing.

Why the calendar does not happen

A month is not a date. "Month 2: cook a full day on the rocket stove" has no day, no owner and no consequence for skipping it, so it competes with everything else in a family's weekend and loses every time.

Four changes make it survive contact with real life:

1. Put it in the calendar everybody already uses, with a specific date, as a recurring entry. Not a list in an app nobody opens.
2. Give each one an owner by name. Shared responsibility means nobody's.
3. Attach it to something already fixed. The clocks changing, the first weekend of the school holidays, a birthday weekend. Anchored dates get done; floating ones drift.
4. Make it small enough to actually finish. An hour that happens beats a weekend that does not. Half the value of the grid-down weekend is available from a grid-down evening.

And log it in the app. The drills page exists precisely so the household can see when something was last done, which is the only honest answer to "do we know how to do this". A skill practised eighteen months ago is a skill you used to have.

The cheapest drill there is

Before any of the calendar's entries, there is one that costs nothing and takes twenty minutes, and it is the highest value exercise in this app.

Turn the lights off after dark and find things.

• The torches, without using a phone.
• The water stopcock, the gas control, the consumer unit.
• The grab bag.
• The first aid kit, and the painkillers inside it.
• The radio, and the card with the frequencies on it.
• The way out of every bedroom, and the meeting point.

Nearly every household fails this the first time, and the failures are trivially fixable once seen: a torch with dead batteries, a stopcock behind a stack of boxes, a first aid kit in the loft. None of that is visible in daylight with the power on.

Do it with everybody, including children, and do it again in six months.

Running the grid-down weekend honestly

The parent page's 48-hour exercise is the flagship, and it is worth doing properly.

Set it up:

• Pick a mild season for the first one. October rather than January. The goal is to learn, not to endure, and a household that suffers through the first attempt does not do a second.
• Tell somebody outside what you are doing and when it ends.
• Agree the safety line in advance and write it down. Anybody can end it, at any time, no argument and no blame. Anybody unwell, any child too cold, any doubt about carbon monoxide, and it stops immediately.
• Do not turn off anything you cannot turn back on, and do not touch the gas.
• Genuinely turn off the mains water at the stopcock, because the water half is where the surprises live and it is the half people skip.

Then live it, without cheating:

• No opening the fridge for the milk. If the exercise says the power is off, it is off.
• No nipping to the shop. That is the failure being hidden.
• No looking anything up on a phone with a signal, which is the commonest cheat and the one that invalidates the most.
• Cook on what you would actually have. Eat from the store, not from what was in the fridge.
• Use the bucket toilet if that is your plan. This is the part everybody skips and the part with the most to teach.

Keep a running log as you go, not afterwards. A phone note, a notebook by the kettle, anything. Written at the time it is a list of specifics; written on Monday it is a vague sense that it went fine.

Doing it with children

The calendar is also how children learn this, and the framing decides whether it makes them more secure or less.

• Present it as camping in the house, not as rehearsal for something frightening. The activity is identical; the meaning is not.
• Give them a real job. Holding the torch, counting the bottles, being in charge of the radio. Competence is what makes a child feel safe, far more than reassurance does.
• Let them fail at it harmlessly. Burnt toast on a camping stove is a good memory and a real lesson.
• Practise the card. Name, address, the numbers, said out loud until it comes without thinking. The children's tier has the wording.
• Answer questions plainly and briefly. "This is just so we know how, like a fire drill at school" is true and sufficient. Children ask once and move on far more readily than adults expect.
• Stop while it is still fun. An exercise that ends early on a good note gets repeated.

The failures are the product

A drill where nothing went wrong taught you nothing, and probably means it was run too gently.

The parent page's last line is the important one: every failure found in practice is a failure that does not happen for real. So the output of an exercise is not a feeling of competence, it is a written list of what broke.

The failures that turn up most often, in rough order:

• No means of opening a tin without electricity.
• Torch batteries dead, or the wrong size, or none spare.
• Nobody can find the stopcock, or it will not turn.
• The camping stove works and there is one canister.
• The store contains no meals, only ingredients nobody knows how to combine.
• Somebody's medicine is nearly out.
• The go-bag is too heavy to carry.
• The phone dies on day one and the charger needs mains.
• Nobody wrote down a single phone number.

Then fix them, one a week, and note the date. That list, worked through, is worth more than the next three hundred pounds of kit, and it is the specific thing this calendar exists to generate.

Re-run the same exercise a year later. The second one is where you find out which fixes stuck.