Dystopia?

Grant stumbled home from a night out with Alison, one of his oldest friends, they had known each other for almost forty years, and although they had never got together romantically, they were almost like a married couple. Maybe if circumstances had been different, things between them might have proved different. They were both in their middle fifties, and still had a lot in common even though the passage of time had dimmed their memories a bit. Their drunken reminiscences in their local (sparsely attended) pub had brought him in mind of the days when ‘pubs were pubs’, back in the ‘80s,  'back in the day', as Grant often said.  Back then, you could go into town any weekend and have a few pints and nips in the convivial atmosphere of a busy smoke-filled pub, bustling with people of all ages, shapes and sizes. Those days were long gone, as most of the populace drank at home, smoking was banned in the pubs, and the trend amongst the young was very much geared towards being image conscious, rather than just getting ‘hammered’ for the sake of it. Drink made you fat, so the youngsters seemed to eschew it, and that was one of the reasons that the pubs were empty these days.

Once he reached home, he switched the kettle on and made himself a coffee, he walked into the hall and looked at his lined face in the mirror, the old guy looking back at him, a balder version of his late father with a greying beard. Grant wore his middle age pretty well, always kept what was left of his hair short and watched his weight most of the time. He still liked a lot of the music from his youth and still felt the goose bumps when listening to the music of bands like the Ramones, the Clash and the Sex Pistols.

He took his coffee and sat for a while at the kitchen table thinking about the evening and what he and Alison had discussed, his drunken meander home, and how much things had changed in the last 30 odd years.

The city they lived in was really becoming like some dystopia, he often thought that the city in the film of ‘Blade Runner’ accurately resembled his home city as it was in 2019, which was bizarre when you think that the film came out in 1982, and was set in 2019.

Groups of yelling, attention seeking teenagers thronged the shopping malls and street corners, most of them looked similar to one another, dressed in black and generally causing trouble in the city’s streets.

Grant often said that he was glad not to be a parent.

The city’s once proud main street was populated by cheap ‘pound’ shops, purveyors or Vaping products, fast food outlets, beauty related shops (nails, eyebrows, tattooing), but of course as everyone said the days of the High Street were long gone, thanks to the wonders of the Internet.

Grant had resisted the temptation, if there was one, of shelling out hundreds of pounds for an I-Phone, he wasn’t going to follow the herd on that score. Why did everyone and their dog feel the need to share their lives on social media? Did anyone really care where their Facebook ‘friends’ were at any given time of the day, or what they were getting up to, interesting or otherwise? He preferred to be ‘below the radar’ not for any sinister reason or anything, it was just that his average guy humdrum life wasn’t really something he wanted or needed to broadcast to the world.

Grant had been amused with the news items on TV about the 50^th Anniversary of the Moon Landings. He had been a kid at the time , only six, but he recalled quite vividly his Mum coming to tell him that a man was walking on the moon on TV, he sat entranced in front of the screen , what a long way it was to the moon, it was way up in the sky , millions of miles away about the world, somewhere out there . He had never forgotten that day, and the free stickers and badges that came free with boxes of cereal, his Airfix Kit of the Lunar Module, bloody hell 50 years ago and he could still remember that.

So much for the so-called ‘space-age’, there were no space stations, settlements on the moon, or anything like that, maybe with the likes of the Internet, I-Phones, I-Pads  and the multiplicity of social media sites , the next generation could try their hand at space travel instead of virtual travel. Maybe science fiction was becoming science fact, he looked out his kitchen window, drew the curtains and shut out the night. As ever, the rain was pelting down as it often did in the city, ironically just like in Blade Runner.

Grant knocked back the remains of the coffee, selected the Sex Pistols album from the rack and turned on the stereo, selecting ‘Pretty Vacant’, and placing the needle in the groove to the chiming guitar intro ,followed by the pounding drums, when the heavy guitar riff surged in, he was propelled back to the 70s in his mind, the goose bumps were still much in evidence. He could turn back time in his mind at least.