My Predictions for 2011

Girls grow up too fast

A fairly well-known person will perpetrate an elaborate media hoax and the media will become hysterically over-excited.

There will be a children’s craze involving an expensive toy.

There will be a children’s craze involving something electronic.

Adults will drone on about their own wonderful childhoods playing in the (free) natural world with a (free) bit of string and a (free) stick.

Teenagers will invent their own language incomprehensible to anybody over 20. Adults will predict dire consequences, and several people will say "Language has got to evolve".

Young adults will discover a technological way of interacting. Two years later, broadsheet columnists will catch up and moan about it. Three years on, the broadsheets will run regular columns on it, picking up on its lamest features.

Someone will publish research showing that girls reach puberty earlier than they did in 1840, giving the media a chance to recycle usual hand-wringing about girls growing up too fast these days, or as we now say, “becoming sexualised too early”.

Girls will outdo boys at GCSE. The press will report as if it was a BAD thing.

We’ll be promised a “new ladylike look for autumn” as a corrective to the tarty chav clothes we’ve been wearing all summer.

A politician will suggest restructuring the NHS.

The media will tell us that:
Welfare money lies unclaimed because people don't know what they're entitled to. If they do know, the claiming procedures are so Kafkaesque they give up.
Police don't interfere in "domestics".
Masculinity is in crisis.
Rape victims should get better treatment.
The January "detox" is just too hard.
Spousal abuse happens in all levels of society.
Fashion houses are making bigger sizes and using larger models.
The pale and interesting look is back – and so are knitting and zeppelins.
People expect too much from marriage (“it’s not happy ever after”).
Internet dating has lost its stigma.
X% of women are wearing the wrong size bra.
It’s OK to be single – and holiday at the seaside.