Cheer yourself up on a gloomy Sunday with Jos Biggs . A question is asked at the end ?
Does your mind ever wander? Mine does!
You know how it is with conversations; they drift on and go who knows where.
I don’t know about you, but I can spend an hour in conversation, and if you ask me afterwards what we talked about I have no idea, apart from I know we talked about it. A thoroughly enjoyable hour has passed, a myriad of subjects have had the light of our collective intelligence shone upon them, yet the world continues to rotate at exactly the same speed, the sun still comes up in the east and goes down in the west and cookies are still the bane of my life unless I can eat them.
One recent conversation started out as a comment on the strange and sometimes appalling weather the UK has been having. From there it drifted on to the occurrence of glacial and interglacial periods; it seems that at the moment we are in an interglacial period – in other words it’s getting warmer – we all know that!
Apparently a leading factor in this is human intervention – we know that too. But did the conversation stumble into silence? No! In fact from it arose a whole new concept – progress.
I ventured that we as a twenty-first century race were extremely clever. We’ve invented all sorts of things.
Somebody followed that up by wondering what we would invent next. That shut us up for a bit while we pondered what we would like invented in the near future.
Then, in the random way that conversations move, we fell to wondering about past civilisations; the Romans, the Egyptians, the Incas and the Mayans among others. Between them they invented just about everything that we now have, except the Internet, but including electricity – cue the Egyptians!
But the subject was far from exhausted. Leading on from the cleverness of the ancient people we noted that the rise of each advanced civilisation was followed by a Dark Age – cue the Romans leaving Britain, and everybody forgetting about central heating.
So if we are so clever, what happens next? Another Dark Age? In the middle of this gloomy prognosis I can see a personal glimmer of hope – satisfaction even!
We’ll forget technology! No longer will I struggle to understand the mobile phone, the computer, the printer, I’ll be quite happy with my slate and chalk pencil!
And Henry’s days will be numbered, we’ll have forgotten how to make petrol shortly before we forgot what cars were - it will be the trusted horse and cart for transport.
That’s all fine with me, as long as we don’t forget flush toilets, hot and cold running water, washing machines and painkilling dental injections!
To prevent this dreadful scenario I’m going to make a Time Capsule to bury in the garden for the enlightenment of future generations. In it I will put the design details of the above.
What about you? If I’ve got room in the capsule, which inventions would you like me to put inside it?
