Focussing on small-scale collapse, I don’t have a freezer, so I wouldn’t miss that (well, not any more than I already do… I seem to have a permanent urge to freeze soup). (incidentally: no fresh meat in a butcher’s?? wtf??!) Not having a fridge would definitely be a bit of an adjustment, though I suppose I’d get used to it. I guess I’d then quite like regular access to a cow. (For milk!!).

I’m with you on missing a sewing machine and music and I’d definitely need a very good wind-up charger for my camera… and I hate to say it but I’d probably really miss my laptop: I type so very, very much faster than I can write by hand, but having said that, I would love to see a return to proper letter-writing, I adored it.

I went six months without a washing machine last year as we had to wait until we inherited one, and I tell you what, I know I could do it again, but you would have to prise the damn machine it out of my dead, clenched fists.

i was really amazed that 4 people are enough to drive such a big PA! i think they had some big capacitors in between to store some power for a few minutes…

The candle-making and the pedal washing machine are def both on my to-learn list too.

Things I want to learn to do:
Make candles for sure.
Make strings for instruments!
And I would second the bike pedaled washing machine. I’ve seen designs before.

As for the sewing machine, I think that sewing machines and washing machines are two bits of technology that really do make our lives awesomer. Handy though it is, I am of the opinion that my cell phone, for example, doesn’t make my life any better (or worse) at the end of the day.

Moonwave: (Haha, now every time I go to type your name I have the urge to type “moonshine.”) Would probably be a good call to learn how to build a washing machine that could be run by, say, pedaling a bike. That to me still sounds much better than washing everything by hand. Then again, I am so used to having a washing machine that perhaps that’s just habit talking. But I never much liked washing things by hand.

And good call on getting an instrument to deal with the loss of music in a situation like this. I didn’t even mention that. I imagine that in a post-collapse situation a lot more people would be making their own music then they do now.

I generally focus on the small survival things when I contemplate a collapse because, really, who the hell knows what form it would take and what exactly would end up happening. I quite enjoy reading post-apocalyptic literature because I find all the various scenarios so fascinating, as well as contemplating how I might manage to survive if I found myself in one of them. If it comes to a collapse, the issue of survival (and the small things that could allow each of us to make it) will probably become the focal point of us lives, so why not think “small”? At the very least it is an interesting exercise for the mind, and who knows what the future might bring.

I only have a small freezer on top of my fridge but I would love to have a huge one and make proper use of it. But if I had to, I suppose I would do without. I do know how to make candles but without convenient little packs of paraffin wax to buy and at some stage presumably running out of remnants of old candles to use, my only option there is to start keeping bees. One day.

Music is another thing I’d miss so I really must get around to getting a ukulele soon, which is apparently very easy to learn. The only sheet music I have is whatever I’ve sung in choir over the years but I do also have notebooks with lyrics to songs written down in them – used to be much more fun to do that with tapes than it is with CDs though.

I have to focus on those kind of ‘small’ things though, rather than the bigger picture of what a chaos life would be in a collapse situation. Easier to concentrate on the post-collapse, if you know what I mean.

Regardless I think I would miss my sewing machine the most, hands down…

All the more reason to really make some radical changes in the way we live now. There are so many fantastic things about the world now, and there would be a lot lost and a lot of suffering if, instead of taking the initiative to live in a less destructive way immediately, we push everything to the limit until everything collapses in on itself.