Tuesday 8th March

I have been asleep for fifty years.  I tucked myself into my cosy little bed last night in Stowmarket in 1966.  The Beatles were still top of the charts after another four-week run and yet so much exciting music was all around, the Stones, Tamla Motown and the beginnings of this thing they were calling Psychadelia.  And I was safe and cocooned in my 14 year old life, soon to be fifteen – a landmark it seemed at the time.  I had no dreams of leaving, of London, of marrying or having children.  And the World was a different but familiar place then.  Harold Wilson was Prime Minister and things were okay, getting better all the time.

And I woke this morning to a new world, where computers rule and we are all subject to their commands, clicking away like robots ourselves.  When I nodded off computer was just a word, occasionally we would glimpse one on telly; they were big as a room and had magnetic tape reels spinning round.  Who would have dreamed we would have more than all of that computing power in a little slab of metal plastic and glass we carried in our pockets.  As I look around me the World has changed so much.

Apparently I have had children and been married twice before; my children are grown up and have children of their own.  I have lived most of my life in London, but now am somewhere I struggle to find on a map in South-West France.  We joined the Common Market over forty years ago but are in danger of leaving again.

The rest of the World has moved on too.  Russia seems as big a threat as ever though it no longer espouses Communism.  China.  Where did China come from?  Africa is still torn by petty wars and poverty but they have mobile phones and telly there too.  The Middle East is being torn apart, but not Israel this time.  Millions are displaced in refugee camps and trying to get to the safety of Europe, where somehow the Berlin wall has gone and Germany is all powerful again.  South Africa has abandoned Apartheid and even though a black man is President there seems little change for most blacks.  In America all sense seems to have left them as two lunatics are vying with each other to be the contender for the Presidency, trying to outdo each other in nastiness.  Unbelievably, a woman will be their likely opponent to replace the even more unbelievable black man currently holding that position.

Queers, once laughed at and hiding their true identities, are actually getting married and openly celebrating their love for each other.  Apparently you can’t even smack your own children now either and they have stopped caning kids at school.  Music now comes from your computer or your phone and hardly anyone owns a record player.  But from what I hear the music is shit today, though The Beatles are still being played by many oldies.

The World has gone mad.  I don’t recognize the place anymore.  And yet there is no way I can turn back those fifty years and wake up back in ’66 with my whole life before me.  I am stuck in this bizarre future that everyone insists is the present and I have no choice but to get on with it.  As I go to sleep tonight I wonder just what the world will be like when I wake up tomorrow in 2066.