Happy New Year!
I suppose I'm at that stage in my life when every New Year automatically summons up the thought of another birthday in July that will take me a bit further towards the end of the Conveyor Belt of Life - a one-way trip for sure, with a bin to fall into at the end.
Yes, that's a way of looking at it. But I am one of those that, while accepting their lifespan is finite, don't wish for an early demise. I am alive and kicking. The aches and pains are minor. My lifestyle and diet is healthy. My interests are mentally stimulating. Unless a serious illness - not yet apparent - drags me down, or unless - out of the blue - some accident befalls me, I ought to live an alert and active life for a long while yet.
I have set myself a target: I will live to enjoy my 100th birthday. And if I achieve that, the target will then - with a nod to Tolkien's Hobbits - shift to my 111th birthday. And no, I am not secretly harbouring an inscribed, indestructible gold ring that I take out and fondle now and then. Although if I do make it to 111 looking good, people may start to wonder!
It's very wise, I think, to set ambitious targets, because then you will achieve a lot more than you might otherwise have done, even if you do fall short.
Reaching 111 means being around in the year 2063. The world will have changed a lot by then. Dramatic climate change will be in full swing. Sussex will have a Mediterranean climate for much of the year, but high summer will be packed with scorchingly hot days that I will find very hard to bear. So either I set myself up in a high-tech air-conditioned home by then, or I'll need to move north - probably to Scotland. I will still expect to eat well, but the foods available will have changed. Much of it will have to be grown locally, in vast weatherproof buildings the size of towns, and not imported from abroad. All that will have to come. And it will be the same the world over, as if we were all adapting to life on a strange new planet, one lush and beautiful in many places, but very, very arid in others, and all parts liable to somewhat extreme and unpredictable weather.
It will be most interesting to watch country after country face up to these climatic challenges. Every state will have to abandon all cherished or time-honoured traditions and practices that will be a hindrance to coping successfully. A lot of things will have to be set aside and left behind, some of them to be badly missed, others in a spirit of good riddance. The countries in non-temperate zones, in Africa especially, will need to make the earliest adaptations. But no country will remain unaffected. One way or another - although not I hope through starvation - the global population will go into decline, reducing the people on the planet to a number sustainable in the altered conditions. Nothing will be able to stop climate change. Regimes will break and fail (and possibly drown in the rising sea level) if they ignore it.
Will there be Fresh Water Wars, Fertile Land Wars, and Essential Food Wars? Somehow I don't think so. I should think it far more likely that resources will be put on an international basis, national interests coming second. America First? Not after 2030. Fortress America then? Fortress China? Fortress Europa? All of them the wrong way. Nuclear threats? Irrelevant.
I don't have an apocalyptic point of view. I do envision huge changes, but all of them manageable. I don't fear the wholesale and dangerous disintegration of societies. Drastic events will enforce much better policies. It will remain normal to live a satisfying and purposeful life, and not merely survive.
So I look forward with keen anticipation to what will come. And if I'm fortunate enough to make it to my 111th birthday, then I will have another forty-three years to see it all unfold. What a thought.
The government will despair of me, of course, as they did with Dad. He enjoyed twenty-eight years of retirement on his more-than-ample Civil Service Pension. I'm sure he ended up on a special list of Civil Service Pensioners who were judged to be living far beyond their expected lifespan. Dad must have seriously depleted the Treasury's coffers. Well, I aim to live beyond his eighty-eight years, and may empty those coffers completely. So if a new tax is introduced, don't blame Brexit. It'll be the Treasury pleading for extra funds, having contemplated the amount of pension I'm due over the next forty-three years.
In fact I'd better take a course in self defence. The government's ultra-secret Civil Service Pensioner Hit Squad is bound to be sent looking for me sooner or later. I want to be ready in my Emma Peel cat suit, all set to clobber them with a karate chop.
