When I was a child growing up in England, one of my favourite books was Little House on the Prairie, the iconic tale of a 19th-century American settler family. This was not just because the story contained powerful human drama - equally mesmerising was that the settlers were constantly battling the elements, as snow storms, hurricanes and floods swept across that giant landscape.
This week, as I hunkered down in New York with my two girls amid Hurricane Sandy, I had an uncanny sense of deja vu. Most of the time New York likes to present itself as one of the most sophisticated places on the planet. Almost anything can be bought or experienced on a computer. This is the city which produced the phrase “Masters of the Universe”, where everyone likes to be in control.
And yet, for a few short days, as Hurricane Sandy hit New York, that pioneer-on-the-prairie mentality returned. People rushed to the stores to stock up on food, hunting for meals that could be eaten if the ovens stopped working. We solemnly filled our bathtubs, in case the water supply failed, collected flashlights and prepared for power cuts. This provided a real cultural jolt for my daughters, who have grown up in a cyber age where everything is magically ordered online via Ocado or FreshDirect: for the first time in their lives they saw shop shelves stripped bare of all bread, candles and torches. So we bought Halloween glow sticks and birthday cake candles, to beat the darkness if the lights failed, and talked about “grandma who lived through the second world war”.