Some time in late 2016, someone somewhere must have wished a curse upon the world of the like the world has never seen before. It must have been said with such fire and fury that the cosmos has had to warp itself around the new paradigm. That curse, put simply was "may you live in interesting times"; we are now living in interesting times.
It takes a very special person who simultaneously achieves very little of substance while at the same time causes a tone of fear and chaos; yet that is precisely what we have seen in the person of Donald Trump. This is a chap who in just seven months, has managed to achieve even less of his administrative agenda than any previous administration with the successful passage of precisely zero pieces of legislation of worth, has at the equivalent point in time appointed less people to administrative and executive positions than any previous administration, and has caused diplomatic hostilities with allies, neighbours and in a stunning turn of events also yelled threats of nuclear war.
Given that within the last week, the imaginary doomsday clock has been moved closer to midnight, I thought that it might be fun to give you a handy guide to the forthcoming nuclear apocalypse. If in the event that I have already been annihilated by the time that you are reading this, then please consider this to be my parting words to a future that quite rightly I am glad to have avoided.
Accommodation:
In the 1950s, during our last major period of the threat of nuclear annihilation, we were still living with the immediate memories of the Second World War. A hundred million people lay dead across Europe in that spate of unpleasantness and so the threat was considered to be very real and present.
In the light of this, people built Anderson shelters in the hope of having somewhere to hide from the fallout. Seventy years later, it is worth considering that sort of plan again. If you can, why not consider building a bunker. My suggestion is to use your existing in ground concrete swimming pool that you've already stopped using because you can't be bothered to clean the filters.
While you're hunkered down in your bunker, you might also want to think about downloading all of the podcasts and television shows that you can possibly think of because it will take approximately 24,000 years for the background radiation levels to return to normal, and you're going to want to have something to do down there.
That will mean that you need to bring some very big batteries down there with you; I assume that that is what the plan is of international scary person, Elon Musk, in South Australia.
Food:
Napoleon Bonaparte who was not blown apart, once said that an army marches along on its stomach. If only he had realised that soldiers actually use their feet because when he got to Russia, he discovered that they actually get cold feet and end up dying where they stand. In his defence though, he did think it a good idea to provide his soldiers' food with little metal armor defences and his armies were renowned for their diabolique cuisine un boitê (food in a can).
In the new world, you might not have access to reliable refrigeration and so you might want to think about stocking up on canned goods. Beans, chili, spaghetti, peaches, potato salad, creamed corn, hot dog franks, and many other kinds of completely underwhelming foods can be found in a can.
How might one cook said canned food? Don't worry, your new nuclear irradiated world itself provides the solution. Simply leave a can of Campbell's Cream Of Disappointment up on the surface for about three minutes and voila, your food will be cooked inside the can. Just remember that you probably don't want to spend too much time up there yourself, lest you end up cooking yourself as well.
Entertainment:
Once you have watched all of the television shows and listened to all of the podcasts that you should have taken into your bunker, it won't take very long before you realise that if you confine humans in a very small space for extended periods of time, they all begin to resent each other. Small things become magnified and formerly endearing traits become grounds for justifiable homicide. Once all of your cultural references have been exhausted and all the jokes have been told, why not think about what they do currently in Scandinavian countries and Russia and write your own dense saga?
Great literature in Russia, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Sweden, was all born in the womb of nights that last six months and conditions so cold that the act of stepping outside is likely to freeze you to death. If your saga doesn't make sense, then claim that it's complex or surreal and then try to look profound. There is a lot of art which is considered to be thought provoking and wonderful, despite being a great steaming pile of pants. If nobody in your bunker likes your work, then claim to be misunderstood and that many other artists were far ahead of their time.
Morale:
In order to keep morale up, why not try to be nice to people? If you're not nice to people then they will begin to look at your thighs as a potential source of steak or ham. You should take it as a given that unless you are nice to each other, then your mini society will devolve into a state of nature pretty quickly and will become brutal, nasty, and short.
If someone happens to bring a guitar into the bunker because they think it will be 'fun', then view them with suspicion. There are only so many times that a human can hear 'Kum By Yah' or the beginning of 'Smoke On The Water' before they flip out. Although you may have the urge to go all Hendrix on the guitar and smash it into a million pieces, please resist the urge. There just might be someone in an unforeseen future who can play the entire catalogue of Billy Joel, Noel Gallagher and Chuck Berry. If you smash up the guitar, you will miss that opportunity to hear good music again.
Also, learn how to write sonnets. It is a scientifically proven fact that thoughts and speeches recorded in iambic pentameter have a stronger chance of surviving into the future. If people do happen to stumble across your bunker in the year 26,017 then assuming that they can decipher English, then your words will outlive you when you're gone.
Remember not to lose heart. If the bombs start falling and the world starts to experience nuclear winter, then that should go some way to counteracting the global warming which we're currently inflicting on the planet. Global warming combined with nuclear winter equals a summer in Sydney of 22°C rather than 38°C and that's perfect for playing Test Match Cricket; so as far as I'm concerned that's not a bad thing. You have to take the good with the bad and if most of the world is either burned to a crisp or snap frozen like a packet of Colonel Birdseye's finest peas, as long as we still have cricket then it can't be all bad. If the impending nuclear winter causes the end of Test Match Cricket though, then my suggestion would be to leave your bunker and take a walk on the surface because a world without cricket would be simply unbearable.
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