You've got fifteen minutes. Decide.

[davywavy]

Seeing as how it was a bank holiday this weekend, I saw this as an ideal opportunity to sit round the house in my underpants looking at pictures of saucy ladies on the internet Play far too much Third Age: Total War Drink myself into a sick-stained unconsciousness get out and about round the vibrant diverse city I live in and do something I wouldn't normally do.

I'm a great believer in in doing different stuff: I think it's good for my brain to be shown a variety of things and it also makes writing LJ posts a lot easier, and so on Sunday my faltering steps took me off to an open day at http://www.19princeletstreet.org.uk/ in East London.

It's one of those old buildings redolent with history of the sort which London is crammed. All of them different in their history but crammed with the weight of centuries of human experience which hangs over you as you wander around and makes you talk in a low voice, as if you don't want to be rude to the memories the place contains. 19 Princelet Street was originally built by Huguenot silk weavers after their expulsion from France and since then has been home to waves of migrants as they've passed through the area, because that's how East London has worked over the years. Migrants arrive, set up home, work hard, get a bit of money, become respectable, and then leave because all these immigrants lower the tone. So it is that once the Huguenots moved out, the jews moved in (and built a Synagogue in the garden), and then they left and waves of african, asian and Sri Lankan migrants moved in, used the building, and then moved on in their turn and the building is now a dedicated little museum relecting these shifts in life of the area.

Anyway, one of the displays was a pile of luggage tags where people were invited the answer the question: You have fifteen minutes to pack before you leave home - and possibly your home country - forever. What do you take? People had written things like 'books' and 'photographs' and so on.
The answers the she-David and I gave gave a clear indication as to the differences in our personalities. She wrote "Teabags and marmite". I wrote "Bullion". Her thinking was that if you're leaving you'd better take some creature comforts for the trip. My thinking was that with bullion you can get creature comforts wherever you end up. It's why portable wealth like jewellry, Japanese netsuke and rare comics are so prized and valuable in unstable areas of the world - you can just grab something small and leg it.

But it's an interesting question, so question for the day: Labour have won the 2015 general election. The jackboots are on the street. You have one small suitcase and fifteen minutes to pack before getting the heck out of dodge.

What do you take?

Comments

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Well I've got survival items all covered with my apocalypse kit :)

So it'd be my kindle (all the books I could want) laptop, passport, bottle of vodka and folder of financial details. Then pad it all out with clothes.

If it's really "the end" bad I'd stuff a shotgun in there too along with a couple of boxes of ammo as well, but they tend not to travel well through security ;)

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Medication I'm on.
Spare specs.
Identity papers (passport, driving licence, birth certificate etc. if I can find them).
Cash, in as many currencies as I have to hand.
Credit cards.
Yes, if I had bullion to hand, I'd take it - oddly enough, I don't keep much of that at home.
Take part of that 15 min to download to the laptop/portable hard drive all the essential contact info from my Outlook account, and any documents I've been writing. If there's time, grab all the e-books I can get, and some music. Pack the laptop and portable hard drive.
Enough clean clothes for a few days.
Sturdy, comfortable shoes, waterproof coat.
The "emergency survival" kit from walking holidays - space blanket, wind-up torch and so on.
Muesli bars, or any other pack-easily keeps-forever food I can find.
Fold-up water container (if I can find it).

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Also, amusingly, when I abandoned Rivendell and it finally revolted (as I figured pumping it for as much cash as possible would be the best plan to get it to revolt so the orcs wouldn't just waltz in to an undefended city) it was taken over by 4 units of rebels, two of which were trolls.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Troll rebels? Hooting heck!

Be careful with your reputation on this game, actually - I got sick of being nice to orc prisoners and just started executing them out of hand (I'm an elf! They're orcs! What else am I supposed to do?). My reputation plummetted fast and Gondor and the Dwarves declared war on me.

Naturally I was outraged.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Top tip there, thanks; I've managed to secure an alliance with the dwarves from the get-go; which mean myself, the stunties and the hobbits are all big pals in the west, I'll hold off my "chase down the bastichs and execute the lot" usual stance, can't remember if offering to ransom is positive or negative...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Oh, as another suggestion, hop on ship early and sail down the coast to grab the island in the bay of Belfalas. It makes an excellent late-game staging post for the assault on Mordor.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Good plan; better build myself another ship then, I sold it to squeeze every last gold coin out of my finances so I could build my economy faster!

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

I'd drill several holes in the suitcase and stuff in the cats and tortoise, along with a clean pair of pants, a toothbrush, my passport and laptop.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Pretty much the same stuff I take when I travel anyway. Phone, laptop, Kindle, chargers, clothes, washkit, notepad, pen, multitool, purse with cards and enough cash for a few days, passport, some small decorative item to personalise the room I sleep in. Apart from the fact I had more clothes and gewgaws than I normally pack, and had to pack actual books because of not having a Kindle, this was what I took when I suddenly upped sticks and moved to Spain for six months on a whim a few years ago. This time round, I would probably add a ball of wool and a crochet hook too.

The problem would be what to do with the cat.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

That building is fantastic. Some of the pictures of saucy ladies on the internet you looked at might have been the ones I took there. ;o)

I think if the apocalypse actually came I'd just panic...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Are you sure it's the same building? I only ask because after 3/4 of an hour I noticed the interior decor looks different.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Ah, same street, different building. D'oh. I was at no 4..

[ddraiggwyrdd.livejournal.com]

Don't even want to think about it. The chance to pack Ems and everything he needs in fifteen minutes is not possible. Maybee if I could just load the car...

My eldest daughter went to Queen Marys and her halls in the first year were a lovely old building on the Mile End rd with the historic Jewish Cemetary behind it.

[colonel-maxim.livejournal.com]

I suspect an automatic weapon, a flak jacket, as much ammo as I can carry and supplies as I head towards Greenwich Clock Tower.

[moomin-puffin.livejournal.com]

Painkillers, diareze, water purification tablets, monkey blanket, cushtie, pad, pen, passport, jumper, sunhat, any jewellery worth selling, talcolm powder, baby wipes, vaseline, kindle and spare pants

[(Anonymous)]

Difficult to flee with a dialysis machine so think I'd stay and join the underground resistence.

Just call me Deja Vu

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Deja V, perhaps?

[(Anonymous)]

Indeed, but that doesn't work as a Top Secret reference :-)

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

My powers of deduction are Holmeslike, you know.

Anyway, nice to have you back. It's been lonely here.

[(Anonymous)]

Why thank you, though I haven't been away - just lurking. This is always an entertaining read, so it's one of the half dozen blogs on my list to check each day.