There’ll be a poppy debate of some kind. Virtue signallers! Fascists! Jingoists! Jobsworths! Too big! Too small! Forbidden! Imposed! Poppy police! Repeat for Halloween (American!), Christmas (too early!), Black Friday (American!), Valentine's Day (Commercial!), Mother's Day (American!), Easter (Children don't know what it means!).
School leavers will be found to lack essential workplace skills.
Some middle-aged people who have only just noticed the last faint echoes of a dying trend will complain about uptalking? And wonder if it comes from Australia? (Middle-aged people took it up about 20 years ago, but fortunately dropped it again.)
Arguments (excuses) for not having a smartphone or joining Twitter will get more and more baroque.
Journalists who have never read a single line of her books will opine about Agatha Christie (cosy, idyll, gosh she wasn’t Miss Marple).
At the start of the academic year, some school will hope to get into the papers, gain publicity and curry favour with Middle England by sending home 50 children for wearing garments that are “not uniform”. (Black suede lace-ups when the list calls for “plain black shoes”, September 2016.) The head will come out with 50 silly reasons for imposing uniforms and rules. He will then be machine-gunned from the roof of the chapel by angry pupils.
At any mention of bankers employing only Old Etonians (surprise, surprise), or Carole Middleton being a former air hostess, the media will pass round its tattered and tea-stained copy of Nancy Mitford’s 70-year-old book on how to tell a member of the upper classes from a yob.
A Polly Filla will write a long article explaining why she couldn't possibly marry her partner (patriarchal baggage, just a bit of paper, outmoded institution) as if she was the first person to have thought of it.
"Why did you give your article such a terrible headline?" people will ask writers on Twitter. Writers don’t write headlines, sub editors write headlines.
Midsummer! It’s more like the beginning of summer!
JSA claimants will be sanctioned for not having a computer (so they can’t search for jobs over Christmas), not being able to use a computer, or being illiterate. Or even blind.
Some Twitter users will fail to grasp that if they reply to their own tweets, we can read their grate thorts in sequence. (Or Twitter will adopt proper threading.)
Meanwhile other Twitter users will only post by replying to their last tweet, so that we have to wade through tweets we have read before to get to the new stuff.
Measures will be put in place to make restaurants pass on tips to staff. Restaurants will get round it somehow. (“Too many employers didn’t understand the need to respect a voluntary code” said a commentator.)
Girls will do better than boys in exams, and many will moan “How can we fix this problem?”
The right-wing press and socmed will attack socialists for drinking prosecco, wearing new clothes, and sending their children to private school. Hypocrites!
A famous software house will issue a new version of its operating system. Users will curse and scream. The same will happen with well-known online picture-sharing services, micro-blogging sites, map providers etc. The firms will not ask users for advice. Next year they will repeat the procedure. (The new version gradually becomes more usable as they listen to their users which they should have done in the first place.)
More newspapers will go online and cease printing.
Many media organisations will sack their sub editors because technology can do their job now. Standards will slide even further and the public will complain, but the subs won’t get their jobs back. The public will blame schools, which “don’t teach grammar any more”.
The media will shed jobs. Thousands of young people will leave university “determined to break into publishing/the media”. They will work as an unpaid intern, and then most will go and do something sensible. Out of work journalists will make money for a while running training courses for jobs that no longer exist.
Even more girls will go to university. They now outnumber the boys six to one.
A few sensible young people will train as butlers and concierges, and a few girls will become lumberjacks, engineers or nuclear physicists.
And two women a week will be murdered by their partner or ex-partner.
Newspapers only ever run two basic stories abt architecture. 1. Egocentric architect. 2. Egocentric architect's building collapses. (@tomdyckhoff)
Journalists will write articles about:
The Forgotten Backroom Girls of [insert enterprise here].
You have been doing X wrong your whole life.
Zeppelins are back!
Masculinity is in crisis.
Predictions for 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment