Sunday Reflections
I remember the book. Big, bold, red and white. A hardback artifact of bright imaginings: The Usborne Book of the Future. It was a Christmas present, sometime around 1979, and it immediately rewired the way I thought about what came next. I was 12 or 13 when I unwrapped it. Old enough to start noticing the world as it was, but still young enough to believe the world could be otherwise.
Inside its oversized pages were marvels: flying cars sailing over clean geometric cities, elevators stretching up to the Moon, domed colonies beneath the sea. The year 2000 shimmered with certainty, painted not as speculation but inevitability. But there was something else too. Something darker. On one page, acid rain etched holes into forests. Pollution choked cities that looked like grey mazes. Even at that age, I felt it. The exhilaration, yes. But also a thread of unease. The future looked amazing. But fragile.
The Newsstand That Sparked a Political Awakening
By the time I was fifteen, I worked in a newsagent. Before school, after school, weekends. I was surrounded by headlines, magazines, and an endless tide of human preoccupations. There, among the ink and cigarette smoke, something else rewired me: the news. It became clear that none of those dazzling futures in my Usborne book were unfolding. The stories were instead about hunger, power cuts, miners striking in the cold, and missiles aimed across continents. I didn’t have the language for it then, but the contradiction sat with me like static.
Breaking the Mould in 1984
At home, I had a Vic 20. Later, an Oric. My first computer came in 1981, and it too hinted at tomorrow. Blinking cursors, BASIC programs, the sense that machines could open doors if only we knew how to speak to them.Then came politics. In 1984, at the age of 17, I joined a movement that promised something radically new. The SDP’s “Breaking the Mould” campaign spoke to the part of me that still believed the future could land. And land better. Fairer. I threw myself in.
By 19, I was a full-time constituency organiser. I became the youngest constituency chair in the country, helped build what would become the Liberal Democrats, and sat on the National Executive Committee of the Young Social Democrats. I believed we were building the scaffolding for a better world.
Our causes weren’t fringe. They were rational, humanitarian, future-facing. Universal basic income, then called citizens income. Electoral reform. Decentralisation of power. Clean energy. Nuclear disarmament. A carbon-neutral economy. We weren’t utopians. We were pragmatic futurists. But even then, you could feel the resistance.
People want change, but they fear it more. Unless it comes on the back of conflict, scandal or anger, transformation is too often postponed.
2025: Still Waiting for the Future That Never Landed
Now it’s 2025. The flying cars haven’t arrived. The carbon crisis we rang the alarm on in the 1980s now drowns cities and scorches fields. Universal basic income is still debated like it’s science fiction. Electoral reform? Still a footnote, while populism struts across the globe in 1930s cosplay.
We are living in a world of microchips and macro-denial. The Moon elevator remains on the page.
Is There Still Time for the Future to Arrive?
And yet, I’m not bitter. Not entirely. There is a kind of grace in continuing to hope, even when the runway is cracked and overgrown. The work we did mattered. It planted seeds. Some of them are still in the soil.
The truth is, I still believe in the Signal. That faint hum of something better, pulsing beneath the noise. It’s quieter now, but still present. In new energy start-ups. In distributed systems. In kids coding climate simulations on Raspberry Pis. In the awkward questions that refuse to go away. The future hasn’t landed, but somewhere, someone is building the landing strip.
Learn from the Past, Live Today, Plan for the Future
My motto, then and now: Learn from the past, live today, and plan for the future. The hard part is that planning requires belief. Not in inevitability, but in possibility. In change. And maybe that’s the final thread tying my childhood wonder to my grown-up activism. I never believed the future would arrive without effort.
We have to want it. Work for it. And perhaps most of all, remember what it once looked like. So here’s to the books that inspired us. The movements that shaped us. And the futures still waiting on the other side of belief.
Let’s not abandon the landing strip.
Let’s light it up.
🔁 Call to Action:
Don’t give up on the future.
If this reflection resonated with you, please share it. Every read, every repost, helps keep the Signal alive and helps me track where this story travels. Let’s build the landing strip together.
Links
Internal Link: Read more reflections in the Voice of the Vortex
External Link: Usborne Book of the Future – 50th Anniversary Edition
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