Post-apocalyptic pastoral: eat, shoot, leave

Oooh! The final, cliffhanger episode of season one of Survivors brought me out in a sweat. I have a very low resistance to suspense. It really was very good – genuinely gripping, chilling and thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked, for me at least, went something like this:

• What on earth would I do in this situation? I have no useful practical survival skills. I don’t know how to trap and skin a rabbit, fix up an engine or use a gun.
• Oh yes... that’s exactly the kind of shitty behaviour people would probably indulge in if the social order fell apart. That irritating prick who’s enjoying shoving a rifle into people’s faces and throwing his weight around – yup, that’s what you’d have to put up with if you made it through to the grim new world. I’m not sure any of our current ministers or politicians would actually really end up wielding any authority over their fellow men when the chips were down, though. Our generals, maybe. Or maybe any surviving politicians would be in their element, conniving and bullying their way back to the top. Just one unpleasant possibility among many.
• ...Yes! Yessss! Shoot him! He’s an irritating prick! (The post-apocalyptic scenario does away with one’s willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt and deal with threat in a peaceful and diplomatic fashion.)

Guns are crucial in the post-apocalyptic world. So are old-fashioned huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ countryman-type skills. Perhaps you’d end up with a sort of peculiar civil war with urban guerrillas and well-armed yokels fighting it out over who gets to be lord of the manor.

One thing’s for sure, the manor’s the place to head for. Cities always turn nasty very quickly when the social order goes into meltdown in the aftermath of plague. The whole post-apocalyse genre is a sort of perverse pastoral in which there’s no option but to go back to the mean old serfdom of tilling the soil, probably with a bunch of thugs and enforcers living off the fat of your labour and deploying you to fight turf wars with the neighbouring badass...

Anyway, roll on season two. Next up: season four of The Wire, which has just become cheap enough to be eligible for purchase. Happy Christmas Eve!