A window cleaner taking his first tentative steps on the career ladder has one of those rare jobs where you can rise rapidly without your father owning the business. Or the ladder. Should you fall by the wayside, you can climb back up and start again.
I don’t watch the Olympic Games any more. Nowadays, the prospect of viewing even remote exercise makes me too tired to lift the remote control. But I still recollect that even when a race got off to a false start, the starting pistol was fired again to recall the competitors.
Our world deserves a second chance. A famous man — correct me if I’m wrong — said, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” And presumably the mice will stop doing so. So I think we should restart the world as a sort of pop-up Earth, aha, I thought you would agree.
This is not a new ambition, of course. D:Ream assured us in a song in 1994 that “Things Can Only Get Better,” although after Bad Boy Records dropped them, I wonder if they still believed that. I’m told that their keyboard player, Brian Cox, had to retrain as some sort of astrologer.
In his 1932 novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley warned against the dehumanizing effects of progress. Little did he know how little he knew, in 1933. In our new improved world, cars won’t have malfunctioning alarms that go off in the dead of night for no reason. This time around, we can have toasters that brown both sides of the bread evenly, and a Google search that offers just one correct answer instead of 3 million mystifying ones, which take me hours to read.
What about a car that runs on fresh air, perhaps in a world with lots of fresh air in it, and a polar ice cap that knows its place and stays in it? We could reinvent people as people, rather than kings, emperors, celebrity know-it-alls, and you know what’s coming next, clever you — politicians! Maybe we could all be permitted to cancel one thing we disliked about the previous world. I know many people would be happy if golf hadn’t been invented — golfers, for example.
The good news is that I have made a start at resourcing our planet. When I heard that fish supplies in the oceans had reached the point where any two shoals were two miles apart, I stopped eating fish. And stocks bounced back almost immediately. I’m just saying, that’s all. I expect no medals.
If we get things right the second time around, we won’t need any progress-fearing Luddites, and they would be unemployed, which was what they feared in the first place! Perhaps they could all become window cleaners, but beware before you employ them — they probably refused vaccination the first time it was offered.
