I’m tempted to give up my EV – but not for the reason you think

I have news that will astonish my family, and frankly, myself. I appear to be turning into a prepper . Not a full-blown, bunker-building, end-of-days obsessive . Not yet. But there are tins accumulating in cupboards , candles in drawers and a wind-up radio on my shopping list. I have even caught myself considering genuinely whether to trade my electric car in for a hybrid. For me, this is a remarkable conversion. I’ve spent years scoffing at preppers, lumping them in with conspiracy theorists, one of the great irritants of modern life.

I thought stockpiling baked beans was something you did before a particularly disappointing camping holiday. But then came those government warnings . Then somebody hacked the supermarket freezers, remotely raising refrigeration temperatures in hundreds of continental European supermarkets. British meat suppliers have been affected too. More than 800 UK retail refrigeration controllers were reportedly exposed online. And when a former leader of the company overseeing the National Grid’s security is warning The i Paper about the possibility of AI-assisted attacks on electricity and water supplies, it makes you wonder about how complacent you’ve been every time you’ve plugged in to charge your car.

Think about that. Someone, somewhere, can apparently interfere with your frozen peas from a laptop. Coming after a long list of hacks and dark warnings, it was the final straw. Consider the evidence accumulating around us – not just the fridges. The M&S cyberattack disrupted food supplies and online shopping, causing an estimated £300m hit to operating profit. The Jaguar Land Rover attack stopped production and inflicted an estimated £1.9bn of economic damage in the wider supply chain.

Food. Manufacturing. What next? Money? Actually, the Treasury Committee revealed that nine major banks accumulated 803 hours of unplanned technology outages over two years. These weren’t necessarily hacks, but try explaining that distinction when your debit card won’t work and the cash machine is sulking. Meanwhile, the Government’s Be Ready website cheerfully advises us to keep bottled water, non-perishable food, torches and battery-powered radios.

It even explains how to identify your electricity network’s emergency power-cut rota. I’m sorry, what? It’s a bit of a gear change. We’ve gone from being told to recycle our yoghurt pots to being instructed how to survive without electricity. And it’s not just me getting nervous. A government survey this year found 42 per cent of people believed a cyberattack on critical infrastructure was likely in their area within two years. More than a third feared a power cut lasting three days or longer.

Yet only 13 per cent felt their household was well prepared. Perhaps the other 87 per cent are hiding their baked beans. My family are less jittery, and regard my transformation with amused disbelief. Every additional tin invites another joke about the apocalypse. The radio has attracted particular ridicule. The irony is that I teach dystopian literature, so I spend considerable time explaining the importance of resilience when civilisation starts to unravel.

I just never expected to apply the lessons to my own kitchen cupboards, or be thinking about a trip to the car dealership over it. But here’s the uncomfortable question: when did reasonable precaution become indistinguishable from paranoia? The electricity system operator forecasts sufficient power this winter. Cyber authorities say the refrigeration attacks have had minimal UK impact. Well, that’s reassuring then. Still, resilience isn’t conspiracy theory.

It’s recognising that our wonderfully convenient, interconnected lives have become extraordinarily vulnerable to things going wrong. I don’t believe the Government is concealing some imminent catastrophe. I do wonder whether its increasingly sombre advice reflects risks we’ve been too comfortable to contemplate. So I’ll decline to buy a smart fridge for the kitchen, keep the tins, candles and matches, buy the radio and investigate the hybrid car.

I draw the line at a bunker. For now.