You know women who scream at the sight of spiders, and say things such as “I could survive in a jungle - so long as I had my hair-straighteners and some chocolate - and an air-conditioned Brad Pitt to sit on!!!!” I'm not like that. I'm not like that at all. I like surviving. I like to live on the edge of civilisation. For instance, at the school's summer fair this year, when it started raining, I totally just lashed up a couple of tarps with some string, supported by a broom stuck in a bucket of gravel - just like that. That face-painting stall was bone-dry to the end. I'm just a bit of a hero like that. I will endure, no matter what is thrown at me.

That's why, in an odd way, I find the incipient Depression, and subsequent meltdown of civilisation, oddly bracing. When Robert Peston, BBC Business Editor, says, “Sixteen weeks into the global credit crisis and things look grim: the Governor of the Bank of England was seen to chase, kill and then eat a rat round the back of the Zavvi Megastore on Oxford Street today”, I think: “This is a test. Only the strong will survive. I will definitely be in the Camp of Strong; with Ray Mears and Ben Fogle. We will be inside, watching the weak ones - Fearne Cotton, Vernon Kay - die.”

This is why, when wilderness-survival.co.uk e-mails me and asks if I'd like to come on a survival course - accompanied by my five equally gung-ho siblings - I immediately accept. If the course goes well, we will be, when oil runs out and we're back living in caves, the most able family in Britain - capable of setting up the Commune of Moran, and ruling the country in a manner not dissimilar to Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

That seems like a fairly good return on a two-day course. We book our train tickets accordingly.

It turns out that our location for learning to survive in a post-Apocalyptic dystopia is - a wood just outside Swindon. This seems only fitting. Joe has promised to pick us up from Salisbury train station and it's not difficult to spot who he is - he's the buff-looking guy in camo trousers with arms like hams and a survival wagon that reeks of woodsmoke.

“You look like a capable crew,” he says, to our communal delight and disbelief. Presumably, what Joe is impressed with is the worn state of our sleeping-bags. What he doesn't know is that they got that battered and stained during one exciting Friday night at Glastonbury, during a game called “Whisky Caterpillars”.

Half an hour later, we are all in “the wilderness”. This is a coppice of birch and hazel that has been abandoned for 100 years. To be perfectly frank, when we first arrive, we are all pretty underwhelmed with the wilderness. It's a slightly murky yet nondescript piece of British woodland. We were hoping for something far more extreme. Maybe the ice planet, Hoth, from Return of the Jedi. Or, at the very least, something with quicksand in.

However, it is when Joe starts to tell us about the woodland that we begin to appreciate the true nature of “wilderness”. And, indeed, form a communal survival crush on Joe that never really abates.

“This woodland is the British equivalent of the rainforest,” he says, leading us down an almost imperceptible animal track. “Come here with just a knife and you could find everything you'd need to survive in an emergency. You'll find that, over the next few days, as you look into the woods, it will be like a series of curtains rising, that will allow you to see deeper and deeper what is really here. I'm going to teach you how to find water, trap, kill and prepare game, make a firebow, light a fire, build a shelter, forage for food and whittle a spoon. This wood is going to provide us with everything we need. Except coffee - which I've got in a coolbox under that tree.”

We reach the camp. It is not some plush, panty-waist, faux-survival luxe-camp, with camo daybeds and a chiminea. It is a piece of awning suspended between four trees, with a camp-fire, a cool-box and Glenn underneath it. Glenn is to be our other survival instructor. Glenn is pretty hardcore. Glenn lives in a goat-shed on Dartmoor. Glenn's wife had a baby three weeks ago. Glenn is very ill. Although he is surviving in terms of the woodland, he is not surviving in terms of the flu bug that he's picked up - he's sitting on a tree-stump and coughing all over his whittling. We are all moved and slightly intimidated by Glenn's total hardness. It is Glenn who introduces us to where we will be sleeping tonight - by pointing to a bit of ground 20ft away and saying: “There.”

As a family, we experience a communal frisson. Here we are, finally, surviving - and not even from inside the luxury of a hedge. It's just the ground we're living on. When, ten minutes later, Joe dishes out our knives and we hang them around our necks, like Apocalypse necklaces, our survival happiness is complete.

As a gloomy green dusk descends on the gloomy green woodland and Joe and Glenn tend to a cauldron of venison stew, we are ordered to go off, find a likely piece of wood, and start whittling our own survival spoons. The dusk is punctuated by the sounds of six siblings messing around with knives, thrashing each other with branches, making owl noises, and loudly saying “I'm going to the TOILET now - don't walk in this direction. I have reserved the east for my comfort and privacy.”

In the morning, I wake to find my sister Weena's face, radiating palpable worry, next to mine. “A spider is trying to get inside me, in a place I have no opening,” she says, pointing at her chin. And indeed, a pea-sized black spider has semi-buried its head and feet into her skin.

“That's a tick,” Joe says, getting out a pair of tweezers, and unscrewing it from her face, like a bio-wingnut. Apparently, there are a lot of them in the woods. They live on deer. We have to be careful removing them, because if we leave any part of them inside us, we can get Lyme disease.

“Is that bad?” my sister Chel asks, querulously. “You can get kind of paralysed,” Joe says, cheerfully. “Breakfast?”

We spend the next hour burning lumps of bread dough, speared on sticks, over the campfire. Our knuckles singe while our arses freeze and the end-product tastes like scorch and glue. We love it. It's so visceral. Glenn and Joe then take us on a two-hour foraging walk, introducing us to sorrel and Hairy Bittercress - or “HBC”, as they refer to it, with thrilling survival casualness. The sorrel tastes like apple-peel. The HBC - or HSBC, as we refer to it - tastes like mud. They show us how to drink the sap of birches, find a huge cache of wild strawberries, and explain how to purify your urine back into drinking water, while we all sit around smoking fags, loving the survival men.

There is then an extended lesson in making string out of stinging nettles - which involves everyone being taught how to pick a nettle and strip it of leaves, bare-handed, without being stung. Some of us master this easily and feel like mighty survivalists. Others get stung from fingertip to armpit, and spend the rest of the weekend whining like women.

The afternoon is split between blood and bracken. Joe has erected miniature models of the three types of shelter we might consider building - complete with Action Men survivalists, for that finishing touch. One of the Action Men survivalists has even had a small survival willy made for him, out of a seed-pod. Joe is understandably proud of this showcasing of his total survival talents.

Having chosen to make the biggest and most impressive type of shelter, we go about felling trees, collecting bracken and drinking huge mugs of tea laced with whisky, aka “Survival Juice”, which Weena brought with her in her rucksack. It takes only two hours of back-breaking work and escalatingly gung-ho survival chat (“I reckon I could totally survive on, like, the Moon now”) to make the Moranderson Shelter: a slightly rickety hexagon of woodland debris, that we are all unendingly proud of. Even when bits of it sheer off in the night, covering us with dirt.

Butchery next. During and after the session, there is strong debate over which is the best bit: milking the faeces out of a dead trout's sphincter; pulling the heart and kidneys out of a rabbit; or tearing the head off a pigeon, then removing the swollen, undigested grain from its craw with our fingers. I have to say, this is my favourite bit of the whole course. There's a very real satisfaction in learning how to flay open a trout and then crucify it on a stick next to a campfire. As I wipe my bloody hands on a patch of grass, I reflect on how dull, by comparison, a spa weekend would have been. Who wants a pedicure when you can flense a rabbit, instead?

The food that night is awesome - pigeon with wild strawberries, cream and sloe gin, followed by more sloe gin and then a bit more gin. Joe explains, while eating vast quantities of chocolate, how we have learnt jack-shit, really: there is a whole world of orienteering, hide-preservation, basketmaking, water purification and odd animal-noises waiting for us and that, really, true survivalists don't turn up in the wilderness with three litres of whisky and their iPods; or chain-smoke while whittling. Or, indeed, put their hands inside an eviscerated rabbit skin, turn it into a glove puppet, and make it sing Valerie in a silly voice.

On our last day - possibly due to both copious whisky and rampant tick-infestation - we have entered a mellow phase of survivalism. There's a lot of sitting around on logs, looking into the campfire and sighing, “I feel so capable”. Every so often, one of us will reach over and unscrew a tick out of the neck of another with the tweezers. It is a chilled scene.

We are supposedly learning different fire-lighting techniques - including constructing and using our own firebow - but are really using it as an excuse to get Joe to tell us stories about how buff he is. When Joe reveals that he knows the daddy of all survivalists - Ray Mears - we pump him, hysterically, for more details, until he tells us of how Mears rescued Joe's Jeep from a bog, by fashioning a tow-rope out of a tree branch. It's literally the best anecdote we've ever heard.

An hour later, filthy, stinking of woodsmoke and with rabbit blood on our trousers, we are back at Salisbury station, waving goodbye to Joe. One of us - I cannot say who - suggests that, instead of going on a course to survive the Apocalypse, that she might just marry Joe and stay near him during the Apocalypse instead.

The menfolk and other women reject this. Which is why we're going back again next year. Just in case Robert Peston's been underestimating how bad it all is.

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