Saturday with Harrison Gardner: The only antidote to an uncertain future is to prepare yourself

Gardner's new book focuses on self-sustainability and learning to prepare for anything

Harrison Gardner's: I wanted to write this book to bring people back to the things that they can control

06.30

I wake up whenever one of my kids, Inari and Isla, wake up. We’ll sneak off to the kitchen and try to give my wife Erin a little lie-in. Isla is a pretty picky eater so it’s porridge with honey and peanut butter every morning. Inari always wants an egg sandwich. Saturday morning usually involves making three different breakfasts for the three women in my life as they emerge from sleep.

10.00

Myself and the girls will often go down to Lahinch on a Saturday morning. We’ll get babychinos and pastries in Hugo’s and sit by the ocean and eat and chat. We’ll usually end up in the playground or the swimming pool, depending on the weather.

The weekdays are when I work on my collaborative projects. The weekend is when I get to work on the projects that I manage myself, whether that’s writing books or making podcasts or editing those things.

I did reluctantly go into media at first. When I was initially approached about doing a TV show for RTÉ, I was hesitant and struggled to see the value or the impact that it was going to have; but my work in starting Common Knowledge and the Build School programme was always about having as wide an impact as possible and, over the years, I’ve realised that media is a great way to reach a wide audience. I was always worried that my voice and the things I care about would get diluted by working in media but that really hasn’t been the case.

12.00

For the past year, most Saturday afternoons have been spent working on my new book Heat, Shelter, Water, Food. My style is to write something once and then tear it up and write it again and again until I’m really happy with it. What I hear more and more from people is that nobody knows what the future is going to look like and everyone is starting to feel a little anxious. If we’ve seen anything in the last few years, it’s that anything can happen and nobody seems to be particularly good at predicting what that is. Whether it is a geopolitical conflict or a natural disaster, we don’t have control over it but we do feel the repercussions.

I wanted to write this book to bring people back to the things that they can control. I believe that the only way to feel less anxious about an uncertain future is to feel more able to deal with it and that means knowing how to have electricity if there’s another storm, creating our own drinking water, having heat in our homes, growing our own food... This book is about helping people understand how these systems work and how to have a back-up plan.

15.00

The weekend is my best chance to hang out with the kids, so, at some stage, we’ll go for a walk down the lane to the workshop. I am really passionate that my daughters feel able to create things for themselves and able to create the world they want to live in. It’s important to me that the girls are comfortable with the tools and that they know that we don’t just buy things — we make them. If I had sons, I’d do the same; I just happen to have daughters.

18.00

Erin and I love cooking, so even if people aren’t coming to visit, we still make a feast of dinner. We go out of our way to get really good supplies from the local farms, butchers, or hunters. More often than not, we’ll have people over for the evening or to stay the night. We have been growing more of our own food lately. The range of what we grow is minimal but we grow a lot of it — potatoes, kale, tomatoes, and herbs. The first year we grew our own veg, most of it failed because we didn’t know what we were doing, so we now try to get really good at growing one thing, then we add something else into the mix.

21.00

We try to do an early dinner with the girls and then, while Erin is putting them to bed, I’ll cook a meal, so we can sit down to eat together. Once the girls are in bed, myself and Erin get to debrief, to talk about our relationship, about the future… all those things.

Lately, we’ve been watching a lot of YouTube rather than the streaming channels. I am really enjoying how the production levels are often a little bit lower but the stories are so deep and the storytelling is so good. Content like that gives me hope about the things that people want to see and engage with.

24.00

If I am in the middle of writing a book, I might go back to the office again to enjoy the peace and the focus. There’s something beautiful about working away in the quiet knowing everyone is safe and sound in their beds.

Harrison Gardner's new Book: Heat, Shelter, Water, Food

• As extreme weather, rising costs, and fragile infrastructure put increasing strain on our homes, Harrison Gardner’s new book Heat, Shelter, Water, Food offers a practical path to greater resilience. From securing heat and water to preparing for power outages, this is a hands-on toolkit for empowered modern living. Published by Gill and available now for €24.99.