In the olden days when I was barely into double figures and essays were called ‘compositions’, a popular topic to exercise children’s imagination was, ‘What might life be like in 2020?’ or other arbitrary future date.
In a pre-space age my notion of hi-tech was American friends who had an electric coffee percolator. We didn’t even have coffee.
I recall too the summer day we heard the throb of an engine and ran out of the classroom to see a miracle – a little plane skywriting some sort of advertisement. It was at once astonishing and apocalyptic.
You’ll gather then that the world was not exactly our oyster. Most of us wrote naively puerile stuff about a future society where sweets were free and we could boss adults around. Many decades later in the more scientifically sophisticated Nineties, I was asked to judge a creative writing competition for 9-11 year olds on the subject ‘My School Trip to the Moon’. There were more than 70 entries. Reams of paper were devoted to the excitement, anticipation of and preparation for the journey. Then most of them just got out of the spaceship, ate their packed lunch and came back. I gently indicated they’d relegated the point of the exercise to the last few lines. I wasn’t invited back.
But I digress. New Year would be alright if it wasn’t for the resolutions. It’s always been a source of puzzlement to me why the calendar arbitrarily chooses to begin a new year in the dank, dark depths of winter, when much of the animal kingdom wisely decides to hibernate. Why, in the wake of the post-Christmas slump when we’re still hung over (financially and otherwise) do we feel it masochistically appropriate to embark on a regime of self-denial and violent exercise? This is no time of year for self-improvement. Cold and cash-strapped – perfect justification for slumping on a sofa in an ancient bobbly jumper with a family-size bag of crisps or takeaway from the chippy and a box set of something you wouldn’t admit to watching.
But no – the trees may be bare, yet we’re hellbent on turning over new leaves.
Aaah… resolutions, now elevated to ‘lifestyle goals’. Easy to make, difficult to keep. Spend less? When the shops are full of never-to-be repeated cut-price offers? There are judicious souls who buy NEXT Christmas in the January sales, put it all away, then forget they have it. Eat healthily? There’s nothing so repulsive as a cold, clammy salad when there’s snow on the ground. Get fit? Join a gym and go – twice? The world and Barney Roney know you’ll never stick it. Clear out the garage? On second thoughts, scrub that. It was one of last year’s that didn’t happen. Take up a hobby, read more, learn a language, watch less mindless telly? Don’t even start. Batten down the hatches till Spring, when all nature knows it’s time to pop you head above ground again. I only ever make one resolution. ‘Be nicer to people’. It rarely makes it beyond January the third.
To describe 2019 as “a turbulent year” is a masterpiece of understatement. “The world,'' as playwright Sean O’Casey put it, “is in a terrible state of chassis”. Most news is bad news – political disarray, economic uncertainty, core services in crisis, a grumbling undercurrent of disillusion and disaffection – and that’s only in our wee corner of it. Wasn’t it Gladstone who said, “The minute you think you’ve solved the Irish question, you discover the Irish have changed the question.”
Yet for the most part, the decency and generosity of spirit of the Norn Iron character is daily manifest in our social interaction with each other.
Another year older and probably deeper in debt, we await the future, going forward more in hope than expectation. Here we stand on the brink of a new decade, which is only man’s measurement of the infinitude of time. What might life be like in 2020? Well, we’re just about to find out……
