With the health minister admitting to stockpiling body bags in the event of a no-deal Brexit, rather than take to the streets to demand a better government (one that doesn’t meet imminent catastrophe with catastrophe storage solutions), our thoughts naturally turn to what we should stockpile ourselves. Perhaps the first place to start is a Brexit emergency kit, available for £300, which contains freeze-dried macaroni cheese and water purification tablets.

As I have been kicking around the traps of disaster-planning since I was a child, when we had a basement full of condensed milk in case we urgently needed to make fudge after a nuclear war, I know a thing or two about survival packs. First, never buy one: like the baffling economics of the Christmas hamper, it is always twice as expensive as everything in it. There is often something chilling buried within, such as a piece of wire that will cut cheese but also go through bone, and that will freak you out before the disaster has even got going.

Instead, build your own. Try not to be too practical: if you think seriously about what you will need in the event of total societal breakdown, the answer is always water, and when you consider quantities, the answer is “tonnes”. When the Iraq war broke out in 2003, my mum still had a load of bottles she had stockpiled for Y2K, which she said was fine, she would use it for washing. We had a big fight about the kind of world she wanted to live in: one where people bare-knuckle fight in the street over crusts of bread, while she walked around, clean and full of condensed milk.

By the time of 2008’s financial crash, I had a child of my own, and finally understood why, when world leaders start flying to meet each other in a rushed, unscheduled fashion and people talk about cash machines drying up, you might want to take personal precautions. If I had been thinking straight, I would have stockpiled money. If I had been thinking half-straight, I would have thought: “This baby is not yet weaned, I need to stockpile chocolate for myself and forget about everyone else.” Instead, I bought a gigantic bag of rice. Then a friend said: “That’s not really what you want, is it, to raise yourself above everyone else?” Unless you’re intending to share it, rice-hoarding is not neighbourly; so I just ate it all, which took a really long time.

There is something up with our wiring: preparing for disaster in a concrete, measurable way makes us feel as though we have agency, foresight and self-sufficiency. We’re building a wall against the feelings of impotence and despair that bad politics unleashes – a wall made of tinned peaches and dried comestibles. It feels exciting, like packing a camping stove or a hospital bag, as if you are meeting an oncoming challenge with resourcefulness, the mature alternative to running about going: “But I don’t want to go camping/have my hip replaced.” Stockpiling offers the fiction of progress – yesterday, no mung beans; today, mung beans! – to cover the reality of disintegration. Who knows, you might be the only person on your street with water purification tablets when the time comes, and who will be laughing then, eh?

In fact, there is no good outcome for your stockpiled beans, body bags or bone-cutting wire. Nobody will be laughing. All those warm, boy-scout, be-prepared feelings are coming from your reptile brain. I’ve stockpiled my way through every crisis since the 80s, and the only surplus I am running right now is enthusiasm for civil disobedience.