THE FUTURE NOW

I MUST FIRST ESTABLISH THE TONE FOR THE NEXT few weeks of badinage by wishing all the good people who assume themselves as being kept under some kind of umbrella term meaning my “friends” the very best for the coming year. As miserably as most of them seem to have done in 2009, unless the planet is invaded by some money-eating bug, the year 2010 ought to be better.


YET I AM AMUSED TODAY as I loll on my four-poster bed in a manor house hotel in the charming city of Évora, in southern Portugal, flipping through the TV channels, by the insight set forth by one Watts Wacker, an apparent “futurist”, no doubt from California, who is so confident about what he knows the future will be that he doesn’t have to appear even semi-respectable today.


MR WATTS WACKER has been telling the obviously face-lifted presenter of CNN Today that the “next decade” will “see us living a future that we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago”. Of course one, at a stretch, can in fact glean some intelligence out of this absurd construction, but my point is that this could have been stated at any time in history by anyone.

FUTURISTS, GOD BLESS THEM, TEND TO OVEREGG THE PUDDING in their predictions, as was made clear in the little vignette presented by CNN about how different generations in the past have imagined what life would be like in 2010. Most of these predictions have seen us dressed in bright-coloured, tight-fitting nylon suits, with no sign of genitalia or mammaries, speaking in clipped monotones, riding around through space on sparkling, dildo-shaped devices, with cute little vacuum-cleaner size robots with names like UB40 or R2FU quacking as they buzz around flashing lights while we just look out the window at the candy-floss of the universe floating by to the sound of music by Strauss, and then we have our weekly 30 seconds of sex over the phone in a little egg-shaped cubicle.


WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF THE SEX OVER THE PHONE prediction, none of this has come true. Yet we persist in our desire to predict. My own view of the future. which is obviously not as inspired as Wacker’s, is that if we continue to allow ourselves to be governed by the half-wits and outright, bare-faced robbers who have been running the USA, the UK and the soi-disant EU for the last thirty years then we will end up not with JetPacs on out backs, flitting about from penthouse to heliport, but at each other’s throats over who gets to share the last potato in the pot. In homage to all “futurists”, I leave you with a little sketch by Van Gogh which shows us Gordon Brown's Britain in 2020.