2011: A Space Odyssey... I wish

Happy New Year to you all! It’s nice to know that, as a species, we’ve managed to make it through another year without destroying ourselves. Well done.

There can be no doubt now that we are living in the future. We have, by some people’s (anachronistic) standards, supercomputers that we can carry in our pockets; for food, we have nutritious and delicious meals that can be reconstituted in an instant; for entertainment, we can watch programmes in greater resolutions and in more dimensions than exist in real life.

But there’s still one thing I want to know: Where’s my jet–pack?

This is most definitely the future. We’re ten years from a Space Odyssey and fourteen years on from when Skynet took over the world (that was a particularly bad day). We are currently living in the middle of a science–fiction writer’s fantasies. So why doesn’t it feel like the future?

I think it’s partly due to the past/present only becoming the future very insidiously, creeping up so slowly that we don’t notice. We’re surrounded by so many amazing innovations and inventions that arrived so gradually we don’t realise how amazing they actually are.

But this doesn’t feel like the future because we’re also missing some essentials. We have lasers, sure, but they’ve yet to trickle down to the man on the street, and just where are the robots?! I can see how these things could be used for less–than–benign purposes and with humanity’s collective propensity to, as Gandhi put it, be a dick – something, I fear, that won’t change in 2011 – I think we might be better off without them for the time being.

But jet–packs are all right. In fact, they’re better than all right, they’re really cool! Admit it. Who hasn’t dreamt of flying through the skies like a bird, laughing at the puny mortals down below? Mwahaha!

Megalomania aside, they would offer yet another mode to commute to college – this would be especially pertinent when the Tube goes on strike... again. Perhaps most important of all, the skies are the one place you are guaranteed to be safe from the commuter’s deadliest predator, the leopards.

Without jet-packs, we might as well be living in the past, which from the future’s perspective is the present, where most people think we’re living already. Such a shame, but who knows – maybe 2011 will be the year of the jet–pack?

I can only dream.

I would also like to take this opportunity to respond to Jamie Henry’s response to one of my letters last term. Mr Henry was upset by some of my remarks on the St. John Ambulance. He found my remarks to be in poor humour and I’m sorry that he thinks that.

But that letter, as is most of what I write, was intended to be humorous. It is impossible to amuse all the people all of the time and I apologise if I have missed a beat, as it were.

However, I will reiterate the tone of that letter, one I feel I made transparently clear, that the SJA do provide a fantastic service and, as a keen runner for charity, I am grateful for their presence.

While people fear illness and injury, some fear doctors, and by extension, the SJA, far more. Illogical I know, but this is the fear I was relating to in my letter.

Once again, Mr. Henry, I am sorry if I have offended you (or anyone else) with my letter. My intention has only ever been to be lightly humorous. I hope this response goes some ways towards making amends.

P.S. Please don’t call me Mr. Davies. It makes me sound like a Physics teacher, a misconception I would hate to perpetuate.