30.01.2008 19:44 - Disco 2000
Picture, if you will, a dark and rainy day in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, approx 1972. Electricity is a scarce thing in this year of industrial action, something which the inhabitants of England try to make up for by wearing as many artificial fibres as possible, so when your trousers brush against your polythene and steel school chair you are able to zap unsuspecting fellow pupils. Because the seventies, may I remind you, where shit. Oh yes they were.
Fortunately, electrons are in plentiful supply on this day. Enough so that the black-and-white TV, with its useless extra channel knob (C4 would finally come into existence in the next decade, about 5 years after this set had bitten the dust) took only ten minutes to warm up. For this was the day when we would be vouchsafed a glimpse of the future!
The future, it seemed, would be a strange world. Everyone would eat pills and wear silver suits, and nobody would ever work, because computers and robots would do it all.
And I now realise that this hopelessly naiive prediction of the year 2000 was exactly right.
Don't believe me? Spend half an hour in any modern disco.
