Over the last few days, London has been covered in rain. Non-stop, relentless, exhausting rain. I imagine that soon the water will rise and collect on the streets of the city. That the rain will be continuous and this will be all we know.
We will carry umbrellas like we carry our phones – everyday and all day. They will be sold in new models like the Umbrella 3G, the Umbrella 4G and for those who think they know better, the Umbrella Android. We will develop new ways to carry our umbrellas in assorted coloured pouches so that ‘the journey home will be sunny for you and your loved ones’. Over time the newest umbrella holders will be made as bodily attachments. Extensions of arms and legs. The umbrella will become a prosthetic, a part of us all. We will disconnect our umbrellas from ourselves before we go to sleep, placing them on our bed side tables ready to charge. They will either need charging due to the latest heat umbrella technology or we may very well charge them without any reason at all.
And our feet. Our leather boots and ballet flats will be ludicrously impractical. Environmental groups will celebrate as leather footwear disappears (later on these same environmentalists will weep over mass cow fatalities in flooded fields). Gumboot sales will rocket and we will talk of the clever people who bought shares in the rubber industry years before. Some real radicals will embrace the new climate and reject the shoe altogether. ‘Let our feet be grounded and our spirits fly free’ the slogan will read. ‘No more squelch’ will be the slogan of the other, less well-known anti-shoe movement. Within the decade the marginalised will be the norm. Shoes will be a thing of the past. An item of ‘old days’ nostalgia, like the record player or ‘Waterworld’ on VHS. And around the same time the first shoe will exhibit at the British Museum our feet will start to show the first signs of mutation. Hannah, the sweet doe eyed girl who works in accounts, will whisper to Harriet in the corridor about the rubbery layer insistently spreading on the soles of her feet. Aged beauty, Alexa Chung, will be the first photographed in Vogue with her trench coat and exposed webbed toes. We will jump through puddles like we are leaping on dried grass. And the human foot will change forever.
And, of course, we will popularise street-boat travel, our houses will balance on stilts, our school curriculums will be modified to include nautical and aviation studies. Air balloons will dot the sky and oil prices will dart diagonally. The ecology will change. London will live on foods they give to astronauts – we will lick powders that require no growth or green. Olympics 2092, held in Kampala, will be a right scandal as UK swimmers will be banned, the IOC deeming human flippers an unfair advantage. The Thames will be no more. The damp insides of Westminster Abbey will smell putrid. Underground train stations will become a dry haven for people to meet over wine and cheese – illegal black market dairy farms will exist in various parts of the city, which the police will know about but choose to ignore (except Sgt Harry who is lactose intolerant and spends his days hunting down the farming criminals out of spite). Wool jumpers unheard of, optical glasses for indoors (contacts for outside), bicycles forgotten, golf courses closed and roller coasters dismantled. Buckingham Palace will be a fortress half under water where King William and Duchess Kate – as they reach their final years – will love a midnight swim, sometimes in the nude.
The water will continue to fall from the sky and rise from the ground. And we will evolve.
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
Image credit: Kathryn Sprigg
