i never gave a date to the future. indeed, i'm not sure that i ever gave any great hope for a future.
that may sound strange coming from one who grew up with a space-age and engineering obsession and who was an avid reader of 2000AD from the first issue, but our reality, certainly in the 70s, was of the cold-war present, the aftermath of WW2 and the fall of empire. the future's presence was felt more in xmas presents and the new plastics, and in american films, which were usually a bit dated by the time they got shown over here. most often, when you thought of the future, you thought of America and americana.
if there was anything other than what we dealt with daily, it was the past; and most of our daily things were from the past. one thing which has always brought a little smile to face is how our books on all things futuristic and spacey were written decades before. so, even our thoughts of the future were from the past.
the future was on the telly and mostly makebelieve (or at least for the rich). the past was everpresent, not just something from long ago and in books. we played in air-raid shelters and bombed-out houses. we played war, fighting the germans and the japs. and since even a lot of our telly was from America's past and in black-and-white, we also played cowboys and injuns.
and when i'd settle down with a book, beside the fire, i'd mostly be reading about the war, the industrial revolution, the middle-ages or the Romans, and i could go and see, hear, smell, and touch those things.
it was in such a context that i found myself, at around 7 or 8, sitting against our house one summery day and musing on a brick in our house, and of all the things it must have 'seen' in it's 150 year life. as pleasant as it was, i jerked myself from such silliness with the jump in logic that as far as i could be concerned, there was nothing before me, that everything is see is only there because i see it so. but i didn't see the future (well, i didn't have a mirror on me at the time :biggrin
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