When I was a kid, about seven or eight, so around 1977 or 1978, I asked my Dad what the future would be like.

I remember his answer clearly as just after he’d finished telling me we had an accident.

We were driving out of Barrow-in-Furness and into the Lake District at the time, along what’s known as the Coast Road. This must have been in August because it was a beautiful day and because the shipyard had a fixed holiday in August every year known as “Vickers' Fortnight”, two weeks when the Yard closed down. The car we were in was rented, we never owned one, my parents perceiving them as a waste of money. Why would anyone really need a car in a town the size of Barrow-in-Furness?

I don’t know why I chose this particular moment to ask, certainly I had lots of questions about the future I was growing up into and, even as a child, a sort of melancholy that there were all kinds of things I wouldn’t live long enough to see, life on other planets, immortality, robots, space travel. Though now, as an adult, it feels as though these things are really possible within my lifetime. On reflection, this confluence, my father’s optimistic description of the future everyone believed to be over the horizon, our little working class family in its rented car going off on a day trip and the car that came swinging round the far bend, windshield glittering in the mid-day sun, and onto our side of the road seems too perfect to have been real. Nonetheless, it happened.

The future, my dad explained to me, would be The Leisure Society. We currently lived in what was called The Affluent Society and this would be the next stage in the forward progress of mankind. As technology and automation reduced the need for people to work and as things became more efficient and durable, so we would shift to being primarily consumers of goods and services: we would work less because we would have fewer needs in some ways. His example was the light bulb. In the future you would have light-bulbs that lasted indefinitely, meaning that you would buy one in a lifetime and that built-in-disposability would become a thing of the past. Freed from onerous work we would concentrate on the higher things, no doubt, poetry, love, the cultivation of interpersonal relationships and so on. You may well say, on reflection, that my father was naive, but this was a broadly held notion at the time, that technology was liberating and fundamentally, would liberate us from work. The machines would suffer for us, they would produce vastly more than we could manage to and we would live on the fruit of their labour.

I was thrilled to hear this of course, as a seven year old who had been past the Shipyard that seemed to be most people in the town’s destiny numerous times and seen the men coming in and out, heard the whistle in the morning that meant that work had started, the whistles at dinner time and at the end of the day, who lived and went to school near the vast, noisy sheds that dominated the road into the town. My dad didn’t like work, no-one liked it as far as I could tell and to be told that it might slowly evaporate as I grew toward it, minimising and reducing year on year until I was free of it all together lifted a lid off the future. The sun was streaming in through the car windows, the sky was vast and turquoise blue, we were on holiday and I was sitting on the edge of the back seat, straight-backed, bolt upright with attention. My dad was perhaps as caught up in this vision of what was to come as I was and this is why, perhaps, he didn’t see the oncoming car until it was almost too late.

Suddenly we were swerving wildly to the left as the other vehicle cut across the white line and into a potential head-on collision, the hedgerow came whipping in through the open window, the tyres bumping and rattling, there was a tremendous thud as the other car went into the left side of us, sent the moulded plastic ashtray that they used to fix into car doors in the Seventies leaping across the backseat and into my lap.

The other car pulled back to the right and then accelerated away. My dad made a U-turn after a few moments of recovering from the impact and checking we were all OK, then, much to my  excitement, set off in pursuit. but the car eventually disappeared among the back roads and in the end, after protests from my mum, he gave up.

What happened on the rest of the day I can’t remember, probably we drove out somewhere in the Lakes and had a picnic, I swam, or threw a Frisbee around with my sister, or read a comic in the sun.


 But despite the unprecedented shock of the accident and the drama of the chase, still, it wasn’t quite enough to wipe away that image of the future my father gave me.