Your Emergency Plan
When it comes to an Emergency Plan, there is just one necessity - that you have one!
An Emergency Plan is, once you strip away the official language, simply one piece of paper holding the four or five things you will not be able to think of clearly on the day you actually need them, and frankly that is all it is.
It records the one person everybody in the house rings if you get separated, chosen deliberately because they live nowhere near you, since it is the local networks that jam first and a relative two hundred miles away can pass messages between you all. It records where you and your loved ones will meet if none of you can get home, where the stopcock and the gas valve and the consumer unit really are (as opposed to roughly where you think they are), what medication is in the house and how many days of it, how much water you have got put by, and your buildings and contents policy numbers along with the number you actually ring to make a claim. That last one matters far more than people expect, because if a flood or a fire has made your home uninhabitable you will be telephoning your insurer from somebody else's kitchen, quite possibly that same evening, and the first thing they will ask for is the policy number sitting in a drawer in the house you have just walked out of, which is why we go on about it at some length in our article 'It's all about the Kerching Kerching!'.
Obviously you know most of this already, but knowing something and being able to find it in the dark, with a torch in your teeth and somebody asking you a question, are two completely different states of affairs. The useful part isn't the paper, it's the hour you spend filling it in, because that hour is when you notice the gaps while the lights are still on and the shops are still open, which is precisely when gaps are cheap to fix. And then you put it somewhere findable and get on with your life, which is rather the point!
Here at Slightly Anxious we provide you with two options about how to get an Emergency Plan:
1) A free .pdf we send you to download, print off, complete and hopefully keep, remember its location and have it at hand when the balloon goes up, or
2) For a small fee you become a member of the Slightly Anxious Members Club, you provide us with the most minimal amount of information and we will provide you with your emergency plan, printed, laminated and in a binder, including local maps and useful emergency information. All you have to do is write your personal data with the supplied grease pencil onto the laminated plan and put it on a shelf - in easy reach for when the fan gets splattered.