Dear LPG,

It is obvious that, when you get brave enough to write something to be put on the internet there has to be a gap between the time it was written and the time that it actually gets displayed on the website, and I wonder just how long that delay is in LPG ‘s case.

But the posts that I find interesting are the ones that were intentionally written to be read months or even years after the time that they were first conceived. 

Predicting the future is something that even the governments of the world cannot do in spite of the fact that, from what I can see, looking forwards and ensuring that the world runs smoothly is supposed to be their main fundamental occupation. 

I am writing this just after Christmas 2020, the year that no one could possibly have predicted, and I took a look at what the internet can offer by way of predictions about what the world will be like in a year’s time. 

If I had had this bright idea at the end of any other year it would have been challenging enough but this year Covid-19 has overshadowed so many aspects of life.  I live in hope that this whole episode of world history will all be over by this time next year even though I thought that it might have been almost over by now.

I wonder if anything will ever be the same after all that.   I suppose that because of my age I am looking at all these questions from the perspective of a pensioner.  We may have been relatively poor before it all started but we are likely to have been affected less financially than our family’s younger generations. 

In contrast however, we are arguably the one section of the public for whom there will have been big emotional, health and mind boggling changes and the people for whom day to day life has been most affected

At this point I was going to make a few predictions but I think that I am full of questions rather than answer’s as I ask myself; will we have been able to share a real family Christmas at the end of 2021, will food shops be the only ones left on our high streets, will good old-fashioned cash become a thing of the past, will we all be free to leave our homes at will again, and how many of us will be suffering with claustrophobia and be too frightened to get out after being shut away for so long?   The biggest question of all will be, ‘can we even remember what life was like pre-Covid-19?’ 

I started this message with a plan to put some of my predictions for the world as it hands the baton over from 2021 to 2022, but I have just ended up asking a few of the many questions that I suppose we will all have a clearer picture of the answers to by the time readers get to read what I have just written.

LF, Bellingham.

LP shared two bits of internet foresight….

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