Off-grid survival requires a cooperative community, which you do not find with homelessness, apart from in small pockets, and among the homeless, there is little loyalty. It’s a competition for resources, power, influence, and control. I once heard a UK Prepper on YouTube talking about having a homeless person in your survival community for their street survival skills. That same prepper is now homeless and claiming to be self-reflective and tells us the Ego is all the bad things that have ever happened to us:- more simplistic new-age nonsense.
Broadly speaking, the id is the organism’s unconscious array of uncoordinated instinctual needs, impulses and desires; the superego is the part of the psyche that has internalised social rules and norms, largely in response to parental demands and prohibitions in childhood; the ego is the integrative agent that directs activity based on mediation between the id’s energies, the demands of external reality, and the moral and critical constraints of the superego. Freud compared the ego, in its relation to the id, to a man on horseback: the rider must harness and direct the superior energy of his mount, and at times allow for a practicable satisfaction of its urges. “The ego is thus ‘in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action, as if it were its own.” Sigmund Freud.
The homeless prepper survivalist is washing with cold water from a mess tin. I have been homeless, but I wasn’t relying on my friends to have a shower, hot water, laundry, and food. There are some great YouTubers showing how they live off-grid, and the key thing that they say is that it’s about being organised, and I agree. I have lived on protest too, and for off-grid living, a cohesive cooperative community is important. I see preppers on YouTube asking if living in community is possible. It is, but it requires compromises to be able to live together. The comments give it away. The “Stop the boats brigade” prepping for armageddon are all commenting that they’d all be fighting within a week.
Every protest camp I have lived in, people just got on with living communally. The only major split that occurred was when the vegans moved out because we went and collected crayfish from the chalk stream and cooked them over the fire- they were delicious.
Periodically, we had to get rid of troublesome people, like the police informer, Claire in the Community (I hope she’s well now), and 1or 2 others troublesome people, including the Druids. The Druids, apart from Galahad, eventually got themselves removed from Berkshire completely after they attacked Lord Hansesn’s SAS security detail and survived without being run over. Note: This episode is missing from King Arthur’s: Trials of King Arthur. Just for the record, it happened at Gotan, and none of the rest of us there wanted their pseudo-rites where they were arguing which way was East.
Self-reflection is not a bad thing, unless you intend to ignore the fact that you think prepping is all about ranting about migrants, and that little episode seems ultimately to be the catalyst for homelessness. Oh well.
We had a shower. It was a watering can on a rope and pulley with a rope on the spout as the on-off tap. Preparedness and survivalism are perfected through hardship trials. Being homeless is a test of skills and resilience, not your ability to feel sorry for yourself and use modern conveniences and other people’s generosity.
Off-grid Camp Showers Running from a Woodstove
People often look at these showers I designed and built for a camp I am involved in running and ask if they are suitable for post-collapse survival. No is the short, simple answer. When Gail Bradbrook says, “We need the people who can build stuff, go to the Big Green Gathering,” this is what she is talking about. But she fails to grasp that off-grid showers like this rely on the water grid to be operating. I need a minimum of 3 bar to get water to the field and up to the header tank for the showers.
The Boiler Butcher
Dr Stephanie Rost’s paper How we could survive in a post-collapse world – Springer Nature, clearly identifies “The ability to innovate and repurpose materials-turning discarded items into usable tools, building materials, or energy sources will possibly become a useful skill, and is a human skill we are capable of. Knowledge sharing through digital or low-tech means like local radio networks or printed guides can help spread crucial information on survival techniques when the internet is no longer accessible.”
The Boiler and 1/2 empty gas bottle were discarded from a boat refit job. The Paloma gas “demand” water heaters are no longer legal for boats. Using this outside presents no risk of leakage. The pilot light didn’t work, so I needed to be present at the boiler when it was operating to ensure it stayed lit. I did this with a blowtorch.
Homelessness Survival
Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters is an excellent story about homelessness in Cambridge. Stuart was a person classed as having a chaotic life.
I have worked on acute mental health wards and within homeless services, and there are crossovers between the 2. But what Masters says about being homeless for more than 6 weeks is mostly true. The longer you are homeless, the harder it is to readjust to being housed again, and that is why homelessness is so difficult to solve, and services run strict engagement rules for those serious about getting rehoused. Homeless services have strict rules. These are primarily to protect staff and vulnerable service users.
Services for homeless people are patchy across the country. Some places have excellent services; others have next to nothing. Towns and cities with good services are well known among long-term homeless people and vulnerable adults who live on the periphery of the homeless community. Drug and alcohol use is rife within the homeless community, and on the periphery are a variety of unsavoury parasites preying on the vulnerable.
Homeless Tourism: Did you know that many homeless people find their way to the South Coast for the summer, Bournemouth, the Isle of Wight, and Plymouth for the summer, and back to their hometowns for the winter. Many Muslim community groups fulfill their charitable responsibility by providing food for the homeless weekly. In some cities, a different service provides lunch every day.
The Key Is Travelling Light and Not Relying on a Motor Vehicle
A Transient Kiwi ( Homeless Kiwi ). His Channel is good, give him a like
Not all Food Banks are open every day, and some require a referral from a GP or Social Worker. But these are not the only ways to get food. I still get organic vegetables from the Hipster shop compost skip. I ate out of skips for several years, and aside from avoiding meat, fish, and eggs, I have been fine.
I am surprised that a Prepper with so much gear, calling himself a survival instructor, is washing himself with cold water from a mess tin, or am I?
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