When I was young...
08/07/2008 13:02  - (SA)  

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David Moseley

You may think you have many options open to you in the future. But you don't. You have two. Utopian or dystopian.

The Sci-Fi movies have had it right all along. We're either all going to end up hugging each other to death in the streets while playful bunnies skip gaily through the daisies because we all love each other so much, or we'll end up blowing each other apart over the last drop of petrol just so we can drive little Jimmy to his last maths class in style.

Such is life. Such is the world and the way we've made it. It might happen tomorrow (which I hope it doesn't, because I still need to do two things before I can die happy: one is run a sub-90 minute half-marathon, the other is to drink as much brandy in a day as Ashley), or it might happen in 100 years time.

I hope for the latter because by then I'll be worm stew and oblivious to the state of current affairs. Of course it might never happen, and one day we'll all sit back and laugh about "the time world nearly went nuclear over the price of bread".

I was chatting to my Gran on Sunday while we watched some video highlights of family Christmas days gone past. She took it all back a notch further when she started reminiscing about growing up in Edinburgh (that's a place in Scotland). "You know, back then," she mused and then paused solemnly while another misguided suicide bomber obliterated a peaceful congregation of Sunday shoppers on the 19:00 news, "all we had to worry about was the Greenside Flasher."

What do you mean, Granny? I thought Granddad was from Glasgow.

"No, you twit. When we were kids in Edinburgh there was a neighbourhood flasher. And a prostitute. And that was all of the big bad world that we saw."

Big bad world

Just "a" prostitute?

"Yes."

For the whole of Edinburgh? No wonder there are so many Scots scattered around the world. Just one?

Today you're on a hiding to nothing. I'd take a neighbourhood flasher as my biggest concern any day of the week. Before you get to lunchtime on any given day you have to contend with the petrol price rising 75c before 10:00, and then again by another 43c after 22:00.

I now walk to work, A, because it saves me petrol and, B, I plan it accordingly so that I always bump into my mate Greg and he buys me a coffee. In 2008 being a bum is being the new rich.

You pray, no longer that your plane won't crash on take-off, but rather that your luggage is on the carousel when you arrive in Jo'burg for your business meetings. Your home could be worth R1m on Friday night, and then R500 000 on Saturday morning. Hell, you could be alive on Friday night and dead on Saturday morning. It's an overwhelming time and place that we live in.

Maybe that's the problem. Sometimes it's easier to walk around the shops, staring vacuously into the windows, waiting for the times to change. Before you know it, your Xbox will be controlling an army of bloodthirsty iPhones and we'll all happily follow their mischievously errant GPS co-ordinates into the ocean.

No need for the T-800 then.

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