Times Between the Times

Mar 11, 2022 | apocalypse, Dead Water, Ukraine

We are in the time between times, the time when we know something horrible is about to happen but we don’t know what it will be. But it will happen soon and Ukrainians are dying while we wait.

I’m 62, and never thought I’d be thinking this way. Back in the old mutually assured destruction days, there wasn’t a lot of point to pondering preparedness because the assumption was that there wouldn’t be anything to prepare for. This thing in Ukraine has the feel of something very different – something that will echo on through the rest of my years. Call me too pessimistic, but it seems to me that, whatever Putin chooses to do now, the trajectory is towards escalation, and that trajectory is unlikely to be interrupted without Putin’s death.

At a selfish level, the impact can already be seen on my pension fund and our savings.  The impact may be transient, but over what timescale? Our local Tesco supermarket is getting embarrassing at the best of times – they barely even bother to disguise the emptying shelves, and prices are going up. Our energy bill is fixed for two years, supposedly, but I don’t know if that can hold without government intervention to steady prices. Even if the conflict remains ‘regional’ rather than European, it’s impact on raw materials, supply chains and economies will be major.

And that brings me back to preparedness.

That all reads dramatically, I know. There may well come a day soon when I look back on what I’ve written here and wince at my foolishness – and I hope it does. But I’d rather be foolish than unprepared, so I’m thinking about stocking up on candles, torch batteries, tinned and dried food and no doubt some other odds and ends, just in case. If nothing else, they’ll get used in time anyway.

And I find myself having to reassess a lot of positions I’ve grown into over the years, positions based on the assumptions of continuing peace. I don’t think of myself as naive, but I certainly think  I need to examine my presumptions. And I hate that: mine is the peace we knew between the wars.