In Competition No. 2468 you were invited to imagine that you fall asleep and wake up 20 years hence, and then report your impressions without moving from the place where you awoke.
Brian Murdoch reported new stamps issued for the Queen’s 100th birthday and the 2012 Olympics postponed yet again, for the 17th time. Mike Morrison envisaged an aged Ken Barlow supervising a pedestrian crossing in Coronation Street and Madonna in the news for adopting a Lithuanian grandmother. Last week I read H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes in which the hero, after a nap of a mere 203 years, is faced with ‘the nightmare of Capitalism triumphant — higher buildings, bigger towns, wickeder capitalists, labour more downtrodden than ever and more desperate’. Read or reread it. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Richard Ellis.
I stared up at the heavily veiled face. ‘Trisha?’
‘Yeah, Dad. Drink this green tea?’
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘She and Gran are being genetically enhanced. Should be back by lunchtime. Gran’s actually dead, technically, but you’d never notice.’
‘And my arms?’
‘Donated to Darfur. Here in the West thought transmission does the lot. I’ve had three kids by TT. Oh, and one circus freak. It happens when you don’t concentrate.’
‘My legs?’
‘Crushed under a Radio Times.’
‘So I just lie here and look at the stars?’
‘Correct. Only they’re painted, not real ones. Ozone layer depletion meant they had to put a false ceiling over most of Greater Reigate.’
‘Trish, d’you have to wear that thing?’
‘’Fraid so. All non-Chinese women have to, except when servicing a government minister. Now, the tea.’
‘If I must.’
‘You must. You’re old. I’m young. You do what I say, see?’
Richard Ellis
A loud voice awoke me. ‘Why are you sitting there?’ I’d fallen asleep (surely only a few minutes ago?) on a bench in St James’s Park, but the bench was now surrounded by dozens of anonymous Soviet-style apartment blocks.
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