Contributed by Christopher Styles
2016
As I walk down Gillygate I naturally find myself conducting a survey of car occupancy in the stacked up southbound phase. On average, thirty three vehicles fit between the lights at the Bootham end and those coming off Lord Mayor’s Walk including today five vans and two busses. On returning from Sainsbury’s Local I count 29 individuals in 20 cars before braving the oncoming Northbound cavalry charge to offer directions to a slightly baffled driver looking for Knaresborough. The way he was holding the street atlas told me that he would welcome some assistance.
29 individuals in 20 cars: that’s an occupancy rate of 1.45 per car. Assuming an average of 4½ seats per car gives us a load factor 32.2%, or a big waste of space and fossil fuel, and an entire Gillygate-ful of cars could be carried on a single bus, though its route would be of necessity a little circuitous to drop everyone off at their final destinations.
Counting, too the number of “tailgate” cars crashing the red light I can’t help thinking that the chronic shortage of housing could be alleviated somewhat by the re-introduction of the death penalty for bad manners.
As a red meat eating functioning alcoholic male aged 57 I am constantly too hot so naturally when I get back home my thoughts turn to a nice bacon sandwich & a cup of tea. Postie, on spotting through my front-room window that I am actually at home and staring right at him is sadly obliged to “ring the doorbell loud and long: resident deaf” and “please allow a few minutes for the door to be answered: very large and complicated house” as is clearly written in LARGE LETTERS on the package . This contrasts with his usual practice of shoving a card through the door then quickly rushing away in order to avoid his rudimentary duty of actually delivering stuff to us.
Ah, clove cigarettes: in the Government’s seemingly never-ending vendetta against grumpy old Goths, I now have to have them delivered from Indonesia as Choice Select of Coppergate are now no longer allowed to sell them tom me. Now my tobacco duty no longer supports the NHS in England but that in Indonesia instead.
Heading back into town I spot yet another tourist walking down High Petergate with his selfie-stick stretched out in front of him. On the screen he is watching the way in front of him through the camera on his smartphone. I wonder how long it will be before people will be unable to comprehend a reality that is not bounded by an arbitrary rectangular frame? And indeed how long will it be before shop windows are all 2 inches by 3¼ inches in size…
2026:
Archaeologists searching for evidence of the Roman remains at Monks Cross are disappointed to unearth the foundations of the long forgotten football stadium which, unlike the recently opened Stonebow Two, was never completed. To think that there was a time before intelligent robots and smart computers when jobs like hairdressers, marketing consultants and professional footballers were almost exclusively the preserve of humans.
After much debate and controversy the Communist majority City of York Council have finally approved the plan to move its headquarters into more fit-for-purpose accommodation. The plan to de-centralise operations into a diverse set of premises throughout the City, has been described variously as “progressive”, “bold” and “bonkers”. The Council has, however identified an ideal main hub in the shape of the smart Crescent Building in St. Leonard’s place which has stood empty for nine years after nobody could afford to live there.
The former West Offices Complex has been sold to the Netherlands State Railway to form the North Yorkshire terminus of their international trail network: it could’ve almost been purpose-built for such a station. No need for an extension northwards now, neither after the rest of the North East of England was sold to Ant and Dec in 2019 in an attempt to ensure that the rump of England remained condemned to Tory rule indefinitely
It’s hard to believe, too that a mere ten years ago, in 2016 the idea of every house having its own inner ring road was the stuff of a mad man’s dream. Like foot streets and bus-only bridges before it I am proud to think that York pioneered this now common feature in every home in the country.
Today I took my customary constitutional around the derelict student castles, taking care, of course to avoid the colonies of feral self-replicating 3D printers that survived the digital zombie apocalypse of the Theresa May premiership. Such a good job all those house building schemes petered out before the student body all succumbed to the antibiotic-resistant superbug that we all know too well as “Taylor Swift’s Palsy”. Like many people I wonder who, if anyone “Taylor Swift” actually was.
I am old enough to remember when antibiotics actually worked but I guess they didn’t see this superbug, the first to be spread through social media, coming. It seems that those arguing that “it’s not more houses we need: it’s fewer people” were proved, tragically to be altogether right. And indeed: who would’ve thought that the obesity epidemic of a decade ago would’ve ended so horribly?
It started forty years ago, now, with mobile phones for yuppies. Thirty years ago it was downloading ringtones for chavs, Twenty years ago and it was “Friends Reunited” for thirty-somethings and ten years ago it was “apps” for airheads with beards made out of bees. Now that we are all linked telepathically, don’t those archaic technologies seem so quaint? I guess we must be very grateful to the recently re-animated corpse of Rupert Murdoch for his selfless philanthropic pursuit of the technology that means we can now take reading each other’s minds for granted.
And indeed it was just ten years ago that I was called a madman for proposing the now well established zip-wire crossing of the Ouse between the ruins of the Guildhall and the proudly resurrected Armstrong Oilers and the Horse Repository. Yes: look who’s laughing now. . . !