Don’t panic... it’s easier to decide not to be in control

Anton compares the days of rationing with shortages in our shops and filling stations

PETROL, gas, toilet rolls again, they’ve all been in short supply recently. You’d think that there was a war on. Or that we’d just emerged from one. Food and fuel became scarcer after the Second World War than during the conflict.

But that meant that nothing went to waste in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Monday’s lunch – we called it “dinner”; dinner was “tea” – was always the same in our house: cold meat from what was left of the Sunday roast; bubble and squeak, which was yesterday’s left-over mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage fried together in a dollop of lard; pudding the remainder of the apple pie with cold custard.

We had to get on with it. Not like today, when there would be widespread alarm if Sainsbury’s began to run out of smoked salmon – which it isn’t, so please don’t start another wave of panic buying.

In 1946, when bread went on ration, one mother told this newspaper’s Darby and Joan column: “I will write to the Derby MPs and give them a piece of my mind.” After those six long, warweary years, folk were just fed up. This time it’s been only 18 months, but people have less patience these days.

By 1954, everything was taken off ration, and that was the end of it. Everything was available if you had the money to buy it.

I don’t remember there being much of a fuss. We all just carried on as normal, cleaning every last scrap of food off our plates, and being careful, because old habits die hard. The only people affected, I suppose, were those who’d traded in the black market, like the little woman from further down our street who scurried about after dark, a large sack swung over her shoulder, knocking on doors, and asking: “Do you want any …?”

We’ve come a long way from those days of shortages to these days of plenty. Because there is plenty to go around if only people wouldn’t panic. Over the past 18 months there have been some unedifying scenes, from supermarkets to petrol station forecourts, as people stock up on things they don’t urgently need.

I have a well-tested approach to shortages. Unless my life would otherwise be threatened, I just decide that I can do without. I wouldn’t want to go back to using cut-up squares of the Racing and Football Outlook – my father was an inveterate gambler – but if the toilet rolls run out …

Petrol? I spent decades working all over Britain using public transport. So as long as the driver who delivers our weekly shopping can still get about I’m relaxed. Reserve the fuel for people who really do need it – medical staff, carers, carriers, tradesmen. The rest can catch the bus to work or the airport.

Apparently, all this panic buying is because people want to feel in control of a situation that they see running away with them. Again, why not just decide that we don’t want to be in control? It’s a lot easier. And, let’s face it, we’re generally not anyway.

Maybe we just can’t help it, though. I’ll leave you with the words of an expert. Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics, says: “If everyone else on the Titanic is running for the lifeboats, you’re going to run too, regardless of whether the ship’s sinking or not.”