Thoughts from a Small Village
September 2026
I used to think that I was good at art, and that sometime soon I might join an art class and show off my talent a bit, in a modest, self-effacing kind of way. But the other day, my grandson asked me if I could draw a griffin. ‘No problem,’ I said, ‘I’ll draw you a griffin, I’m really good at drawing.’ And I set to work. After five minutes, my grandson looked at my drawing and said, ‘That’s not a griffin. That’s a bumble bee.’ So I took a closer look, and together he and I considered the creature on the page. ‘That’s definitely a bee,’ he said with the clear-eyed insight of a nine year old. And I had to agree, it definitely was. I tried to make excuses for myself and my drawing, explaining that I am not overly familiar with the anatomy of griffins. But really, I have lived long enough to know that anatomically, griffins and bumble bees do not have much in common. Unless griffins produce honey, which I’m pretty sure they don’t. I had to admit, that if while out walking I should stumble across a griffin, I’d be unlikely to mistake it for a bumble bee. ‘Shall I show you what a griffin looks like?’ said my grandson, so I gave him the pencil and paper, and inside of a minute, a griffin sprang to life on the page. There was its feathery face, its hooked beak, its powerful wings and back legs, and its tufty tail. And the more his griffin looked like a griffin, the more my griffin looked like a bee.Sensing my embarrassment, my generous grandson offered me a way to redeem myself. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe you’re better at drawing trees?’‘Trees?’ I said, ‘I’m great at drawing trees. Just watch ….’ and I took the drawing pad and pencil back again, and began to draw. After a few minutes my grandson said, ‘That’s not a tree, that’s a bonfire.’ I sat back, and looked at my tree, and saw that what I imagined was a delicate interlacing of twigs and branches was in fact, a hastily assembled bonfire thrown together by a vandal, and the best thing to do with it would be to put a match to it.‘Shall I show you what a tree looks like?’ my grandson offered, so I gave him the drawing pad and pencil. And before my eyes, a tree grew on the page, it had strong roots and a sturdy trunk, a bushy canopy, and lo, in its topmost branches, a delicately poised bird’s nest complete with mother and chicks.‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’m great at drawing faces. Why don’t I draw you?’He paled, and recoiled, and said, ‘No thanks. Maybe you should bake a cake.’I’m re-thinking my art class membership..
July 2026
It was so light in the evenings in June you could nip outside at ten o’clock at night and start pulling up a few weeds. However, now the nights are gradually beginning to get darker again and sadly, we will soon notice the difference. So to help us to come to terms with the prospect of losing our lovely light evenings, we should take a step back and consider the movement of planetary bodies in the Heavens which results in our days getting shorter. This would reassure us that everything is happening exactly as it should, even though our evenings are growing darker and we would much rather they weren’t.
Now, I can’t claim to be much of a scientist, but I think we could make a useful start by clearing up a common misunderstanding. Some people think that our increasingly lengthening days are caused by the gravitational pull of very large things like the Earth, on much smaller things that can’t pull so hard. This is an interesting theory, but unfortunately it’s completely nuts so we won’t waste any more time on it.
Instead, let’s consider which way we are facing out there in space. We all know that the Earth spins on its axis and when we face towards the sun, we’re very warm, but when we face the other way, we’re very dizzy. Incidentally, spinning on our axis is something we all do when things get on top of us. I’ve just spent a week looking after two children under nine and I spent most of it spinning on my axis.
Perhaps it would be more useful to clarify this astronomical situation by using an analogy based on fruit and vegetables. Think of the Earth as a large orange, and the Moon as a tomato, or a banana depending on the time of the month, and Pluto as a tiny pea way out in the distance somewhere. In the middle of all this is the Sun, which we can think of as a big pumpkin holding everything together. The tomato revolves around the orange and gradually becomes a banana, and the orange revolves around the pumpkin and spins around itself, and the pumpkin is in the centre of everything and is not looking forward to Halloween. Pluto is still a tiny pea and no one cares where it is. This demonstrates that there is a whole salad bowl of manoeuvres going on out there in space making sure everything is precisely where it needs to be, even though we much prefer lighter evenings to darker ones.
Well, that’s probably about enough astrophysics for one day. The pumpkin is already sinking below the orange and before you know it there will be a tomato in the sky. It’s dinner time, and up there in the Heavens the sky is a little darker than it was last month, but all is well.
June 2026
These days, keeping up with the news means subjecting yourself to one dire warning after another. The latest warning is that very soon, AI is going to take all our jobs and do them much better than we can. Meanwhile, we will sit around idle and remember how useful it was to be employable.
So if you have young people in the family to advise on careers, here’s what to do. Encourage them to consider careers in hairdressing or plumbing, because these are the most AI resistant jobs on the planet.
I had my hair cut the other day by Heather, so I tried to imagine how it would be if Heather was replaced by an AI droid specifically designed to cut and style hair. How relaxed would I feel if my hairdresser was an artificially intelligent robot with a compound eye the size of an orange and four segmented arms wielding scissors? Would we have the same cosy chats about scone recipes that Heather and I usually have? I don’t think we would, to be honest. I think I’d be mute with shock. I’d be gripping the sides of my chair ready to bolt. It just won’t work, not least because expecting a droid to give you a decent hair cut is like expecting your dog to cut your finger nails. No, I predict that hairdressing will be one of the very last jobs on Earth to be replaced by AI, and in 50 years time hairdressers will be the only people still going out to work.
There are some who say that AI plumbers will be with us soon, but then there are some who say that a real plumber will be with us soon and it seems that both events are pretty remote. We had a plumbing problem recently and we spent days trying to find a plumber who had time just to speak to us on the phone, but we drew a blank. In the end we would have gladly welcomed an AI plumber clanking up our garden path. I’m all in favour of AI plumbers on account of the fact that real plumbers seem to have become virtual plumbers. Good luck finding any plumber, actual or digital, with time to drop by before the end of the century, and if you do, please give me their number. The field is wide open for all interested youngsters, there’s more than enough undone plumbing to go around.
Even more worrying for me is that AI now is capable of writing emails, short stories and whole books. It’s very difficult to tell now, whether you are reading something that has been generated by an AI program, or written by someone chewing on the end of their biro.
Well folks, it’s been lovely to chat, but I’m feeling a bit run down. I must plug in and recharge my batteries so I can get to the end of this s……...
May 2026
It’s about two years since I first heard of Chat GPT, and now I have the app on my phone. I don’t know what GPT stands for, (Get Pleasantly Tipsy?), but I could ask it, and it would tell me. It has an answer for everything. Basically what Chat GPT does is to answer any question at all you might type in to ask it. A few seconds after receiving your question, it will scroll out a politely worded, well organised and comprehensive answer.
When combined with You Tube and the internet in general, this has robbed older people of a status which they have enjoyed since time immemorial, of being invaluable members of society due to the knowledge and experience they have accumulated over a long life-time.
Most young people now will not ask their grandma when to wean a baby, they’ll ask Chat GPT. They won’t ask their grandad how to change a tyre because You Tube will show them how.
We hear a lot about how Chat GPT and other AI platforms are affecting young people. However, who, apart from me, is voicing any concern for the cohorts of older people walking around with their heads full of half remembered, possibly useful bits of information that no-one now wants to know about? It’s taking us a while to cotton on, but we are out of a job. True, no-one was paying us for that job, but we have lost the status and respect that went with it. You Tube and Chat GPT and the like have made us redundant fountains of wisdom.
There is only one way forward for us older folks now, and that is to forget every sensible piece of advice we have ever learned, and become wild, fun loving and irresponsible beings. We must shake off the restraints of our years of accumulated wisdom which is now worth nothing, and do something mad. No-one is looking to us to show them how to do the sensible thing any more, so we are now free to do whatever we like.
So! What shall we do, now that we can forget we’re supposed to be stuffed full of hard earned wisdom? We could go hang gliding, we could learn how to pole dance, we could sell the car and buy a Harley-Davidson and dress in black leather.
Or failing that, we could ask Chat GPT for suggestions which incidentally, I have just done, so I am going to pack a bag and go off to stay somewhere unusual, like a tree house, or a glass igloo. Chat reckons I’d enjoy that, and who am I to argue?