In the future blah blah blah

I have decided on a change of career. Writing’s all right but it really starts to hurt the tips of your fingers after a while and I need the tips of my fingers for drumming impatiently on things. I’ve thought about it hard and long and I’ve concluded that the career for me is that of futurologist. I plan to go on the lucrative lecture circuit and say things like ‘In the future, your trousers will tell you whether or not they go with your shirt’ and ‘In the future, everyone will have a small windfarm on the top of their head.’ It’s the perfect career in many ways because unlike real work, it’s consequence-free. The trick is not to say anything that will be proved to be Jackanory within your own lifetime. Stick to the long-term and you can’t go wrong. ‘In the future, tiny nanobots with nanoscissors and nanocombs will render traditional haircuts obsolete’, that sort of thing. By the time it becomes clear that you were talking out of your arse, you’ll be too dead to care. I think it’s a good idea to keep it positive, too. I mean, who wouldn’t want their own windfarm on top of their head? That kind of news is always welcome. Gloom and doom is harder to sell; ‘In the future, we’ll all be up to their necks in seawater and new aquatic species will skip stones at our sun-burned faces’. I also plan to be prolific in my predictifying. That way, you never know, I might even get one right. Maybe they’ll speak fondly of me in the year 2200, looking back in wonder at that lonely visionary who foresaw the day when sentient apples would pick themselves and roll into the shops unaided.