The ultimate armchair read? It’s got to be the ‘SAS Survival Guide’

Iona McLaren hunkers down with the most reassuring – and entertaining – book for these straitened times

Like many readers, you may have taken self-isolation as your cue to get stuck into War and Peace. But after hours of beavering you may now be simply stuck. What you need is a book that speaks to the great themes – the long night of the soul, the triumph of the human spirit, how to fix a carburettor when all you’ve got is a pair of nylon stockings – but one that is pocket-sized and fully illustrated: Tolstoy-lite. What you need is the SAS Survival Guide.

This multi-million-copy-selling classic was written in 1987 by John “Lofty” Wiseman, a man whose terrifying achievements include being, aged 18, the youngest ever recruit to the SAS, and setting up the SAS Counter-Terrorist Team (the ones from the Iranian Embassy siege). Now 80, he makes Bear Grylls look like Paddington. His memoir is called Who Dares Grins.

Coronavirus has pushed us all a bit further along the prepper-anxiety spectrum. If you need a reality check, treat yourself to a long, hard peruse of the SAS Survival Guide. It could be so much worse. This is a book that tells you how to make a grass skirt to shield your groin from predatory birds. Here’s a drawing of a man (with a luxurious, croissant-like moustache) self-administering the Heimlich manoeuvre with the aid of a tree stump. Here’s how to prepare shark for the pot: boil for 24 hours to remove the taste of ammonia. Wiseman stops briefly to address “emotional trauma”, before moving swiftly on. “Can you cope? You have to.”

I am thumbing through my childhood copy of the SAS Survival Guide now. It’s very dog-eared and, if push came to shove, I’d pick it as a post-apocalyptic companion over any dog (and I say that having learnt from Wiseman exactly how you’d go about eating your dog: “Remove anal glands. Boil thoroughly”). Whether it’s making your own safety matches (dip the tips of regular matches into molten wax), lashing seal carcasses into a raft or midwifing a baby, there’s no scenario the SAS Survival Guide doesn’t prepare you for. As Wiseman put it, without false modesty: “What I have written has saved lives.”

In all honesty, I have never put Wiseman’s advice to practical effect (apart from making one den, which my brothers and I abandoned because our camouflage netting smelt with great intensity of feet and burning tyres). Some of it is off-limits, anyway: Wiseman grudgingly reminds the reader that they “must be restrained by the need to avoid cruelty to animals, and by-laws which some of these techniques may contravene”. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s plump pet rabbit.

And besides, actually doing any of this arduous stuff is hardly the point. It’s a brilliant armchair read, like a condensed version of all the best adventure stories you have ever read:

Willard Price in stock-cube form. Simply owning it makes you tougher. The writing is wonderful, sometimes deadpan Hemingway pastiche (“You are only as sharp as your knife”), sometimes excitable (of wild boar: “Some have thick hair, and all are pig-shaped, with snouts and tusks. Listen for snores and creep up on sleeping ones!”)

It’s the book we all need, not because there’s any imminent requirement to

‘Shark must be boiled for 24 hours to remove the taste of ammonia’

fletch our own arrows (page 135), but because it’s a cheerer-upper of weapons-grade effectiveness. When Wiseman tells you that, in 48C (118F) heat, “without water, you will last two days [...] if you sit in the shade and do nothing”, you will thank your lucky stars that you aren’t bouncing over some sweltering desert in a plane with an as-yet-undetected engine fault, but instead stuck at home near a delicious cold British tap.