First aid kits, torches ... fairylights?: Britons prepare blackout boxes

Customers having their hair styled on the pavement in Hatton Garden, London, due to power cuts after a miners' strike in February 1972. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

For Steven Dowd, it’s four head torches and a handsaw. For Ian Welsh, a pack of camping freezer slabs and a pair of slippers, and for Ellie Moss, a community gardener in Eltham, a cheering set of battery-operated fairylights.

With warnings that the UK could be subject to planned blackouts for the first time in five decades, the question “what’s in your blackout box (or BOB)?” could become as everyday a conversational gambit this winter as bemoaning the British weather.