By Aliya Whiteley

On the Point of the Vorpal Sword

The Blue Pootle often fondly remembers her wonderful childhood: the sunshine, the flowers, the little white dresses, the bunny rabbits, the tea parties and – hang on, I’ve confused Lewis Carroll and my childhood again. You won’t believe how often that happens.

Right, well, my childhood had good moments and bad moments. I got to act the part of Cinderella in the school play. Good. I forgot to leave behind my glass slipper after the ball, chucked it on stage from the wings and brained Prince Charming. Bad. Stuff like that. So when somebody asks me, ‘Blue Pootle, what was your childhood like?’, I’m stumped. What is a small fluffy creature meant to say to such a question? How is it possible to sum up eighteen years of life with one slick phrase?

Which is why I’m always surprised when everyone else manages to answer that particular question so easily. There seem to be two usual answers:

• It was terrific. Frabjous. I had tea parties and often went on marvellous adventures down holes and through looking glasses. Calloo callay.

• It was terrible. My Dad was Fred West/my pet dog was Fred West/I was Fred West.

 As much as I want to give everybody else on the planet the benefit of the doubt when describing their own childhood, I have to say I remain sceptical because I know something about the human condition, and the desire we all experience every day to simplify.

Simplification should be a GSCE subject: we’d all get A stars. Just consider how many times today you’ve already simplified in response to the following types of questions:

• Are you busy?
• Are you sure?
• What are you thinking about?
• Did you have a nice time?
• Happy, darling?
• Is that the best you can do?

Brains are marvellous at the three C’s: cogitate, compute and concentrate. Instantly our minds take all the possible answers to these questions, squish them into a messy pile, and pick out the one option that is not necessarily closest to the truth but will also get the result we want, whether that is a smile, a hug, a deep conversation, or a few extra minutes of peace and quiet. How easy our complicated grey matter makes it for us to lead a simple life.

Except for in one area. The future.

I’ve recently been conducting an experiment. I’ve been asking people what they think the future will be like. And everyone, even those people who just want me to shut up and go away with the kind of venom usually reserved for call centre workers and people with clipboards standing outside Debenhams, gives me an answer of more than one sentence. Okay, so the first words are usually, ‘Ummm… er… I don’t know….’ But then they start to warm up to the theme, and suddenly I’m thrust into visions of alarming luridity which can involve individual windmills, government-controlled brain implants, mass transit systems that run on root vegetables, euthanasia, deadly virus-carrying chickens and world enslavement at the hands of the lowly home computer.

Why does the future have to be so difficult? Can’t we get our amazing brains to tone it down to a few basic ideas and leave it at that? Maybe if we all agreed on simple things to aim for, we’d end up actually arriving at a nice, easy-going reality in five hundred years or so.

So here’s the part where I enlist your help. I want you to decide to think uncomplicated thoughts about the future. Maybe we can agree on something basic. How does the following sound to you:

In the future everyone is lovely.

And that really takes care of everything, doesn’t it? And don’t just pooh-pooh me, you slithy tove. We’ve tried the route of planning every step of the way towards a better future and ended up in more mimsy frumiousness than we started with. Instead of arguing fiercely about whether ID cards, free trade and Republicans are good things or bad, why not just aim towards a big picture of happiness? Couldn’t that work?

I know. I’ve under-complicated and over-simplified. Well, there had to be a first time for everything. I’m off to find a teapot to curl up in. You want to talk about your dystopian vision of the future?

Eat me.

Word of the Day: Kelemenopy. A sequential straight line through the middle of everything, leading nowhere.

Go here to provide the Pootle with feedback, start a discussion about the burning issues addressed above, talk about her new novel, Three Things About Me, or simply to say hi (probably best not to start a discussion about the future though).