I’m a big fan of ‘winging it’.

There are some people in life who like to make a schedule and stick to it religiously.

But I’m one of those people who like to just see what happens and go with the flow.

I can then respond to problems as they occur and I don’t get disappointed if things don’t go to plan.

Sometimes this relaxed attitude to planning provides magical moments that you could never have planned for.

Other times, you’re sleeping on the floor of Red Funnel’s Southampton terminal because you ‘hoped’ there would be a ferry at 2am.

I was a scout (Beaver of the Year 1997) so you’d think the ‘Be Prepared’ would be engrained deep in my soul.

But, apart from carrying a 20p coin tied in handkerchief with a piece of string in my pocket I’m not really sure what we were being prepared to be prepared for.

Maybe it’s Disney’s fault? Scar’s terrifying song Be Prepared from The Lion King scared the bejesus out of me as a child.

I associated preparation with evil. I much preferred Timon and Pumbaa’s laissez-faire attitude to life.

I don’t have an emergency supply of tin food hiding in my apocalypse cupboard, I don’t meal prep for the week, I don’t buy event tickets more than a month in advance, I don’t know where I’ll be in five years time - I barely know where I’ll be next week!

If it’s sunny when I leave the house it is very unlikely I will remember to take my coat whatever the weather forecast says.

Some say it is delusional optimistic, I say it’s ‘going with the flow’.

Now, I can have this joyfully relaxed approach to holiday booking and a casual attitude towards buying my family’s Christmas presents… but I’m not running government!

Those are the people who you would hope would actually have a plan.

We can swan around our day to day lives taking it easy and laughing at our lack of planning when we’re sipping a hot chocolate on Sandown seafront in the pouring rain with nothing but a T-shirt and shorts on.

But you’d like to think that the people we elected to look after all that might have some sort of a plan in case of… I don’t know… a pandemic? Maybe a bit of flooding? Climate change?

But with the witness testimony from the Covid-19 inquiry and the response to the flooding on the Island this week… it appears to me that our government and local council are also just ‘winging it’ just as much as I am.

So it turns, once again, to those incredible members of our community who step up to fill the void.

They muddle through and get things sorted, responding to problems.

The ones without a plan, but who ‘go with the flow’ and help out when the time comes.

They delivered food parcels in lockdown, checked on neighbours, put in shifts at the hospital.

This week we’ve seen teams of volunteers helping fill sandbags, unblock drains, clear roads.

The people who were supposed to have a plan had parties and ate sausages whilst those with no idea what was going on went out and helped us all get through the mess.

Maybe I need to be a bit more prepared. Our leaders certainly need to be.