Alexandra Shulman: Why Apocalypse Porn Has Become Our New Guilty Obsession

Last weekend, a group of us sat around swapping photographs. Not the usual pictures of grandchildren or a new Uniqlo purchase, but images of a Safe Hero Flash Hammer, a gadget no bigger than a penknife.

The idea is that if you are trapped in a car after an accident and cannot get out, this tiny tool can be used to smash through reinforced windows, even underwater.

All five of us bought one, despite the vanishingly small chance that any of us will ever need it. One especially cautious friend bought four.

Among my friends, doomscrolling through anxiety-inducing scenarios seems to have replaced property porn as the favourite armchair pastime.

Now the Government’s new Be Ready advice, urging everyone to keep three days’ worth of water and supplies at home in case of an emergency, has given the hobby fresh momentum.

Where we once spent hours studying Rightmove listings and leafing through Country Life while fantasising about homes we would never own, we now Google the equipment supposedly needed to survive the coming Armageddon.

As for me, I have done absolutely nothing to prepare.

Doomscrolling through anxiety-inducing scenarios seems to have replaced property porn as a popular armchair pastime among my friends, writes Alexandra Shulman [File photo]

I cannot understand the sudden rush for wind-up radios when replacing a battery is hardly difficult. And I am already well supplied with baked beans, thanks to a larder full of the more luxurious Bold Bean varieties.

We have enough dinner candles to last several years if the electricity fails, while my position on the hypochondriacal spectrum means the medicine cupboard is generously stocked.

As far as I can tell, emergency-preparation campaigns have existed for years in countries including France, Finland, Sweden and Poland. Ours has appeared only now, perhaps to give the new team in charge the impression of having done something practical.

The only step I might take is to keep some cash at home. I shop too much to risk being unable to buy anything if the bank cards stop working. The greater danger, however, will be forgetting where I put the money.

Halloween has become a much scarier proposition

On a train back from West Sussex on Wednesday evening, I saw groups of girls dressed as Pretty Woman-style sex workers, complete with micro-miniskirts, fishnet tights, chokers and corsets.

They were clearly heading to Halloween parties, where the dress code in recent years seems to have shifted from wizard hats and witches’ broomsticks to unapologetically risqué costumes.

Halloween streets are now filled not only with hordes of small children trick-or-treating but, as women make their way to parties, can sometimes resemble a red-light district.

And it is not just very young women embracing the brothel-inspired look.

The Mail’s Diary page recently featured posh homeware designer Alice Naylor-Leyland wearing a black leather bustier with matching horns, while the Countess of Durham posed as a bloodstained St Trinian’s schoolgirl for a lavish party.

Whatever happened to the traditional ghost costume made from a white sheet with two holes cut into it?

A family talent for glamorous relationships

Some men seem to have all the luck. Gorgeous Alexa Chung has confirmed her engagement to actor Tom Sturridge, who was previously in a long-term relationship with Sienna Miller, with whom he has a daughter, Marlowe.

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Perhaps it is a family trait. Tom’s father, director Charles Sturridge, who was responsible for the 1980s television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, also has an impressive history of glamorous romances.

Before marrying Tom’s mother, actress Phoebe Nicholls, who is no slouch in the style stakes, he had relationships with several of London’s most desirable women, including the extraordinarily beautiful Julie Christie.

Alexa Chung has confirmed her engagement to actor Tom Sturridge, pictured at Wimbledon

Builders paper over the cracks — quite literally

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the cracks that appeared in the house after the baking-hot summer.

Thankfully, the builders have now arrived to deal with them.

As they excavated the damaged areas, they discovered that the outside plasterwork had once been packed with newspapers rather than anything more substantial to fill the cracks.

I have no idea whether this was a standard practice, but I was curious to discover how long ago the work had been carried out.

The newspaper used was the Daily Express, and its date revealed that the shoddy repairs had been made in 2005 — just a year before the previous owners sold the house to me.

Any future buyers can at least be reassured that, 21 years later, the job is finally being done properly.

It is sad that Jennifer still does not feel good enough

Jennifer Lawrence, 36, has told American magazine The Cut that, after having her second child, she feels her body is not quite up to scratch and wants to be a ‘sexy mum’ when she takes her children to school.

I found that a curious reason to have breast surgery. She is already exceptionally attractive and a first-rate actress, so the thought that she felt she needed to look more impressive on the school run is sad, if rather bewildering.

I have no objection to her having surgery — her body is her own — but it is a shame that a woman with so many advantages still does not feel good enough.

All the more so because the people she says she wants to measure up against are likely to be other women: fellow school mothers, or perhaps Manhattan’s army of Filipino nannies.

Jennifer Lawrence pictured at the Christian Dior fashion show in Paris on September 29

Free to roam where a Dragon once thundered

The Times Literary Supplement notes that, in autumn 1803, the first steam-powered carriage, known as Trevithick’s Dragon after its inventor Richard Trevithick, thundered along an empty Oxford Street.

The shops had closed and horse-drawn carriages were kept away for the occasion.

Now, 223 years later, the London thoroughfare has been newly pedestrianised, with cars and buses banished once again. What goes around comes around.