I remember enjoying the children’s comic called Century 21, and how I would wriggle with pleasure at the thought of that far-off future that awaited me (aliens, teleportation, Life in Spain, and the USA run by an orange lunatic).
Now here we are, all those years later, a quarter of the way towards Century 22.
I’m not sure how to write this, but things aren’t looking too good: global warming, food shortages, Artificial Intelligence and end-time politics.
Even though none of us will make it that far, our grand-children will, poor blighters.
I used to go up to the square outside the church in Mojácar on New Year’s Eve, where the town hall had prepared fireworks, cava, pots of grapes and silly hats.
Someone had underwritten a new system for the church bells, which used to be tugged with a dull clank (when the urge took him) by the resident campanologist, a dim-witted fellow in a dirty smock known as Lumphead. The new system, connected by satellite to some place in Germany, allowed us the dubious treat of a regular carillon on the hour, and a paroxysm of jubilation on certain events, of which la misa del gallo on Christmas Eve, a hundred different occasions during Easter and the village fiestas and of course New Year’s Eve were the foremost.
Thus we find me, with a thousand others, outside the church (few people ever go inside while things are going on there), watching the clock as it winds its way to midnight, on New Year’s Eve 1999 and the turnover from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.
That publication from my childhood was wrong about some stuff, but spot-on about others. Wasn’t it where the notion of the Millennium Bug would first be brought forward, where all the computers in the world would go clunk as the simple programming failed?
Ours did.
The church clock shuddered to a confused halt at precisely 11.59pm. We stared upwards, holding our breath, as absolutely nothing happened.
Around about four minutes into the new century, somebody blew a squib, releasing our doubt.
Huzzahs, champagne corks and fireworks rent the air.
We kissed, embraced and hugged our neighbours, as Mojácar, the only town in Spain to do so, apparently decided by Divine Will to remain firmly in the Twentieth Century (much to the noisy relief of many of the celebrants).
Anyhow, and sorry to relate, Mojácar eventually caught up and even overtook its peers.
But enough of that. Welcome to the Year 2025!
Who’d a thought it?