Two Decades of Change?

It is nearly two decades since I got married.  How is that possible, I ask myself?  I mean, I got married last century for goodness sake! 1998.

So much has changed.  From where I live and how I work to having children and a dog.  We have sadly lost many people of course.  But we have also gained them - a wonderful sister-in-law and nephew for starters.  I think I lost myself for a while in the middle of it all.  I didn't mentally take well to babies and small children.  But essentially, I think I am now in a happy place.  I think I am carrying the twenty years okay.

Looking back, organising a wedding in 1998 was a very different experience.  No hotel websites, no travel planning, no Pinterest to plan complicated table decor or find the perfect dress.  Gift lists were done in person at shops.  Disposable cameras on the tables - no phone cameras or social media.  I have books and books of photos but nothing online to take reprints from!

But what about the state of the world in the last two decades?  Clinton was US president, Blair was UK Prime Minister.  Princess Diana had only been dead for a year.  Saddam Hussein was still alive.  The Twin Towers were still standing.  No such thing as smart phones and the internet was something you mainly used at work because the connections were so slow on home computers.  

And yet, when you Google '1998', the Wikipedia page is sadly familiar.  The details are different but the larger events are the same.  Massacres, plane crashes, 'authorised air raids', earthquakes, nuclear testing, North Korea, train disasters and tentative space exploration, to name but a few.  Even the 1998 World Cup final shows depressingly little difference.  France beat Brazil 3-0.  Same teams on the same merry-go-round.  And apparently fashion is currently having a '1990s moment'.  As if one go round at platform trainers, cargo pants and crop tops was not enough.

With twenty more years experience and twenty years of technological change, you would have thought there would have been more progress on the big questions like 'is there life in outer space?' or 'how do we deal better with earthquakes/floods/droughts?'  But no.  Humans seem to put more effort into arguing amongst themselves - often via violence - than working together to solve the problems facing our planet as a whole.  We still haven't even managed to feed everyone.  In fact the rich/poor divides are much worse in many places.

I'll be pushing seventy if I see our ruby wedding anniversary in twenty years time.  I may well be a grandparent by then.  I do hope we as a race have made more progress by then.  It's about time.

By the way, Friends was already on our television screens.  Do you like my 1990s 'Rachel' wedding hair...

Is the Future Bright?

For various reasons, I didn’t sleep well or long enough last night.  Too much chocolate, too many episodes of Father Ted (RIP FrankKelly/Father Jack) and too much looking at The Oscars on Twitter when I woke up at four in the morning.

The Oscars completely fascinate me.  I love film and have a membership for my local independent cinema (you can take your wine into the screening, what’s not to love?).  I also do love fashion but Oscars ‘fashion’ is a whole other ballgame.  Not so much fashion as a gigantic advertising exercise. 

You long for Bjork and her swan costume to turn up again.  Just to see the expressions on their faces.

But my purpose for adding my not-very-big-oar to the Oscars chatter is to wonder about how we reached this level of global recognition of an unelected (relatively) few.  That is not to take away from the winners’ achievements at all.  Merely to think how far we have come in a hundred years.

I am in the process of writing a piece about ‘the future’.  The brief says will it be better or worse, tell us in a story.  Now, I do love science fiction but when I brainstormed (well, more pondered over a cuppa) a list of what might be considered better or worse, I was quite appalled to find that the ‘worse’ list seemed, to me, to be more likely to happen.  It was all global warming (and yes, I did see Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscars speech live, thanks Insomnia), global war, rich/poor divide stuff.  Global peace, food and water for all, etc on the ‘better’ list seemed pretty unachievable.  And I am usually a glass half full kind of person.  Some things – like ‘no work’ – seemed like they could go either way.

But when I looked back – something I much prefer to do, hence the genealogy obsession – I could see how very unlikely our current situation would have seemed a hundred years ago.  1916.  The First World War was raging, manned flight was barely ten years old, the movies existed but silently, no Russian Revolution yet.  On and on, ad infinitum.

2016 and I am lying in bed watching a live awards ceremony over five thousand miles away on my ‘phone’ (which I use for reading, writing, listening, taking photos, shopping, general communication but rarely phoning).

Do you remember ‘Gulf War Vision’ in the 1990s?  When war was first properly shown live on television?  Watching bombs fall?  How long would the First World War have actually lasted if everyone could have seen what was going on?

So February 2116.  Where will we be?  Will we still be ‘alone’ in the universe?  Will we finally have worked out how to walk around in space ships like we have been able to do in movies for the last fifty years?  Will Leonardo’s predictions of global catastrophe have come true?  Will the Oscars ceremony have stretched to a two day love-in?

I want to finish this post with the old ‘answers on a postcard’ line but that is so last century.  Comments below please?!