I’m trying to start a fire. There are four men clustered around me – the survival course leader, his sidekick, a Times photographer, and a famous author. I can’t see them. I’ve forgotten they are there. All my attention is focused on a tiny nest of twigs and bark that I’ve made, and the sparks from my firesteel.

The famous author is Neil Strauss, best known as the unscrupulous lothario who introduced The Game, a set of rules for men who wanted to manipulate women into bed. He’s no longer the lounge lizard that inspired an entire generation of Nuts-reading chancers. The manly skills he seeks to promulgate now are even more primal than sex.

Convinced, as increasing amounts of people are, that an almighty crisis is due to strike our society; a crisis that has the potential to change how we live forever, he has reinvented himself as a survivalist.

Seeking to do more than just hole up in a Midwestern compound with some combat trousers and a selection of assault rifles, he has explored everything from barbecue skills to relocating to a Caribbean island.

Like any good journalist he documented his journey in The Game’s successor, Emergency. Emergency works both as a gold-standard piece of gonzo journalism, with Strauss sharing the extraordinary lives and motivations of his subjects, and as a detailed manual on how to prepare yourself before the long wild party of civilisation comes to a messy end.

Longer chapters detailing his quest to transform himself from an effete, deskbound writer to a self-reliant woodsman are interpolated with short two-page comic strip ‘how to’ segments on everything from evasive driving to sawing through plastic handcuffs with a pair of shoelaces.

I’m here today, at a self-sufficient farm outside Guildford, to get a small flavour of Neil’s research. Despite the jeremiads you might see in some of the more excitable newspapers, the chance that ours will be generation that sees a colossal social collapse like the Fall of the Roman Empire or a pandemic on the scale of the Black Death is still reassuringly slim.

However smaller, more short-lived catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina or the devastating Carlisle floods crop up on a fairly regular basis. For the unfortunates caught up in these ‘routine’ disasters, the world may as well have ended for the weeks before basic services are restored.

Knowing how to start a campfire without matches, or how to use the charcoal it produces to construct a crude water filter, is a more essential skill than we might think. As our instructor reminds us, it’s not a question of if the next major flu outbreak will occur, but when. When it does, bad things will happen.

The thin veneer of civilisation that enables us to live packed tightly together in the great conurbations would soon erode if 30% of our essential workers were dead or disabled by a future pandemic.

If the electricity supply and fresh water that make urban life so agreeable gave out, if the supermarket shelves were no longer being restocked, it’s not an exaggeration to say that anarchy would be weeks away. The only safe response - rather than to join our desperate neighbours re-enacting the wilder scenes from Mad Max films in our local shopping centre - would be to retreat to the forests. For that we’d need some basic survival skills.

Strauss has already learned how to get by without modern plumbing. He also knows how to handle a variety of weapons, how to kill and skin a goat and how to obtain citizenship of a country with fewer enemies than the USA. To do so he has rubbed shoulders with charismatic survival advocates like Tom Brown, a knife-fighting expert known only as Mad Dog, and a huge amount of needy and directionless souls who in some cases, Strauss wryly notes, are using the training as a substitute for their psychiatric medication.

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