I was at a friend’s birthday party the other night and another friend announced that he and his flatmates had a set of protocols in case the dead arose and started to feast on the living. Unfortunately I became distracted by the lemon squares that had suddenly come on offer and never got the chance to continue the conversation any further but it did remind me of a similar conversation a year or so ago with my flatmate’s boyfriend.
We had a book “The Zombie Survival Guide” that lay in our bathroom for several months and, judging from the well thumbed appearance it quickly developed, was a source of much toilet-based entertainment. It became so popular that I walked into our kitchen one day to find my flatmate and my other flatmate’s boyfriend discussing a survival strategy in case a “Dawn of the Dead” scenario ever arose.
Step One: Block off the staircases. Being on the third floor we could ensure our safety from the zombie hordes below. The book suggested destroying the stairs completely but ours are solid Victorian stone and so this would probably require several days and some sort of wrecking ball, neither of which would be practical so we’d just have to settle for barricading ourselves in with various items of furniture.
Step Two: Once the immediate danger of being eaten by zombies had passed we would have to turn our attention to longer term survival. The book recommends that every household should have a stash of canned foods in case of such an event but, as all I have in my cupboard at the moment is two elderly potatoes and a box of teabags along with tube of garlic paste that I’m certain isn’t mine, this isn’t going to happen and so this would have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. My flatmate suggested that we could grow vegetables in the back garden. I pointed out several problems with this plan. Firstly, and most vitally, I didn’t have any vegetable seeds and I very much doubted if anyone else would have a packet of cabbage seeds kicking around. Secondly I suspect any of us would know how to grow a dandelion let alone enough vegetables to feed five. Thirdly vegetables take weeks to grow and so we would starve anyway before the first potatoes had taken seed.
Step Three: If by an amazing act of divine intervention we actually managed to grow something that was both edible and nourishing we would construct an array of zipwires to get around and link up with similar communities in Marchmont (probably propelled by all the gas produced by a diet of vegetables). Again I saw a problem. None of us were engineers. One of my flatmates only has one tool in her toolkit which is a hammer which gets used from everything from assembling flatpack furniture to changing a light bulb and the bookcase that I bought from Ikea is held together by duct tape and hope.
I was firmly told to stop being pedantic. I was missing the point. The point wasn’t long term survival but rather avoiding being zombie snacks. We’d probably perish of hunger or plummet to our deaths from a poorly constructed zipwire or just kill each other in some sort of cabin fever induced frenzy but hey, at least we wouldn’t be zombie food. And that was the most important thing of all.
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