(Roughly) Daily

If you were to browse a British newsstand in the early 1980s, you might have discovered a rather unusual magazine.

Called Protect & Survive Monthly or “PSM”, it aimed to teach people how to survive the almost unthinkable – nuclear war.

“How many citizens would know what to do to protect their own lives and loved ones?,” wrote editor Colin Bruce Sibley in the maiden issue. And how many, he asked, would look dumbfounded to the skies, “waiting for a ‘convenient’ bomb to explode above their head and blast them into eternity?”…

What’s old is new again: check out a publication offering detailed advice about how to prepare for nuclear war – it makes for timely, fascinating and occasionally morbid reading: “The bleak, chilling magazine for nuclear doomsday preppers.”

* Alfred Jarry, the opening line of Ubu Roi (and a deliberate misspelling)

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As we duck-and-cover, we might send painfully-prescient birthday greetings to Alfred Jarry; he was born on this date in 1873.  A Symbolist poet and critic, he is probably best known for his play Ubu Roi.  But he might more deservedly be famous for his creation of ‘pataphysics, a movement resurrected at the dawn of the Cold War (by the likes of Raymond Queneau, Eugène Ionesco, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Julien Torma, Roger Shattuck, Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx, and Marcel Duchamp)… and surely due for another revival about now.

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