Memoirs from the Future
I had a good childhood, we had loads of gadgets, a laptop each, and food, lots of food. We never did get a glorious summer holiday like the ones my parents used to when they were kids.
Only the usual dreary rain. They’re now calling it the mini-monsoon season.
But the food, fruit of all shapes and sizes, vegetables and meat every day, there was no shortages then.
Things started to get difficult while I was still at school, the austerity years. I went on to university because there was really nothing else to do but I could see my parents were worried and wanted me to get a job, so when I left with a degree in Media Studies, I got a job with the local farmer putting in drainage ditches, I mostly drove the electric quad which was great fun. That lasted 9 months and I haven’t had a real job since, oh, except for the year in Germany back in the late 30’s, I worked in a chicken shed, good pay but I missed my young family – they weren’t allowed to join me so I came home.
Nowadays we get by, I sell 2nd hand dd’s, get them cheap from a mate down Tescos, my wife’s brother sends us some money from time to time, he works on the offshore rigs maintaining wind farms.
We get most of our food from the field, well the country was on the brink of collapse in 2027, I remember the queues outside Tesco’s, a mile long in Nottingham they say, then came the food riots, I once saw an old lady…. no, I’m not going to relive that story for you.
The government had to do something so they compulsory purchased fields around all the towns and we had to buy them off the council, I still owe £200,000 for our plot but there’s no way I’m going to pay it. I’ve heard they’ve been writing the debts off as people die but no one really knows, there’s very little information coming out of the cities now. Some say Birmingham is now being run by an overlord called Branson and the government’s moved to Oxford but we don’t hear much out here.
I admit, I did laugh when London first flooded but I wasn’t laughing when they stopped my benefits to pay for the clean up. The very next year the same happened, you’d think they would learn wouldn’t you? They finally abandoned the place in ’32.
Our plot is quite good, I’ve put a lot of work into it, still didn’t help us last year when there was a complete harvest failure.
It wasn’t until December before the council started issuing M&Ms – maize and molasses.
That was a bad year for the children, next door lost their only child, but at least they can still try for another.
We have the maximum permitted 2 children, one of each and now we’re both sterilised. I couldn’t bear to lose either of ours.
It was a hard year. But we got through it and this year is much better, a good bean crop and potatoes too. They are life-savers I can tell you.
People are saying that things will be getting back to normal now. Ha! We’ve heard that before.
It’s been 10 years since they told us that we would be getting fat on grain from Siberia and we’ve still not seen any. So much for global warming eh? They said it would make it easier to grow Mediterranean crops – olives and grapes! How wrong they were, we stopped listening to “the experts” a long time ago.
No one really bothered about climate change when I was a kid. I asked my granddad about it, he said there was nothing we could do, it was all the fault of the Chinese apparently.
Mum says it wasn’t like that, she blames the oil and gas companies like Shell and BP but I don’t believe her, BP folded years ago and Shell is such a small company just doing bottled gas, I can’t see how they could have caused it.