Fortune-telling

I suppose that in a stable, unchanging world with no need to consider events in faraway places, personal affairs must predominate, and it becomes important and necessary to wonder what might be in store.

The same old-fashioned questions to do with betterment and personal fulfilment. Will I meet someone nice, and marry? Will I have a home of my own, and have children? Will I prosper and live a long time? And so forth.

It was once commonplace to 'have one's fortune told' at various points in one's life. There were palmists to consult, some of them most respectable. Horoscopes to be drawn up - not the vague ones in newspapers but proper ones, with the precise position of the planets determined by ephemeris tables, revealing surprising conjunctions and oppositions indicative of character and likely fate. Tarot cards to deal out and interpret. Old ladies read the tea leaves in their cups and made exciting but confidential pronouncements to their friends. There was Old Moore's Almanack. And, of course, there were the gypsies, who were the most skilled in the art of fortune-telling.

What happened? Where has all this gone to?

I don't say that nobody bothers with fortune-telling any more. A residual demand clearly still exists. But the reputation of fortune-tellers, and the old methods of seeing into the future, have declined. Where now Mystic Meg on TV? And although it may be fun to ask which star sign someone fanciable was born under, who takes any serious notice of a potential incompatibility? We have become 'scientific' and 'sceptical' and shy away from being thought naïve and gullible. Belief in fortune-telling, or a conviction that somebody is gifted with psychic or magical powers, smacks of being simple-minded. (Although, to be frank, a blind belief in anything that can't be backed up with proper evidence seems also to be an unsound proposition. The world is full of theories that 'explain everything', and full of charlatans who dream up the theories. It was ever thus)

I do think that after the disillusionment of the Second World War, and the explosion of the first and second nuclear bombs, people learned to fear the future and lost interest in knowing what lay ahead. I grew up with the threat of a nuclear holocaust ever-present. It was always there in the background, with Russia and America rattling their rockets in snarling unison. Annihilation, deliberate or accidental, was going to come from one or the other. It was just a matter of time.

You could try to ignore it all. I'm sure that we all grew up hoping for a better world, a peaceful world, that we couldn't quite believe in. But the decades passed, and belligerent leaders were replaced by new people who were tired of the military competition, the mental strain of walking a tightrope, and indeed the fantastic cost of staying up front in a perpetual arms race. I like to think, also, that there was a growing awareness in their minds that much bigger things (such as growing world shortages of vital but scarce mineral resources) had to be faced up to, nudging them into more conciliatory positions.

But this long period of fear for the future had its effect. Who really wanted to know about their future, if the answer might be a horrible death in a searing nuclear blast, just three months ahead? Forward plans still had to be made; but who ever felt assured that they would live to see old age? A few built bunkers for themselves, determined to survive whatever happened. The rest of us carried on, lulling ourselves with sex and TV and the trivia of the moment.

Still, momentous events gave hope. For instance, the fall of Communist Rule in Europe, or at least its mutation, after a whiff of true popular democracy, into a motley collection of money-driven oligarchies. No global attack could come from any country run by fat-cat criminals intent on amassing gross personal fortunes. So it felt like a safer world, for a while.

But by then the notion of 'having one's fortune told' had become thoroughly odd, a part of the Old World, the pre-nuclear world, and at best rather a joke. Nobody thought you could really see the future revealed in a crystal ball anymore.

And what now, on the last day of 2018? Are we hopeful for the future? Would we like to consult a fortune-teller about it?

For myself, no. I believe that you make your own future by what you do in the present. I am investing in personal health and fitness, and planning my spending and general lifestyle, in order to ensure - so far as I can - that I shall have a comfortable and interesting life twenty or even thirty years hence. Who knows whether that effort will pay off. I expect that some of it will unravel, or be thwarted by European or global events.

I have a feeling though, that we will continue to 'enjoy' a kind of peace. Russia recently-announced hypersonic missile system is, I suspect, intended not so much to impress America, but to cow smaller, upstart regimes on its far borders. In my view, the real killer will be global warming: something I shall see the effects of, if I really do live to my nineties. It will be tiresome, coping with very hot summer weather and very severe winters.

But there are the Lessons of History. And those are: that nothing stays the same - all things must change; and that there is always a tomorrow, come what may.