1.
The year of 1872, the house number 7 on Saville Row, Burlington was inhabited by the fictional Phileas Fogg. 2084, it was in real life occupied by Ms Stella Burns who was very amused by the book written about travelling the world in 80 days. 2084 in Great Britain was totally different times. Stella read a lot. It was her job, she worked providing an informationcompany with facts about the beginning 10 years of the century. The information was so diverse and she wrote thoughtful pieces on how 2000-2010 was looked upon in the present day. She had a little curious speciality and that was Swedish history and anecdotes from that time, something she had studied at University. She wrote shortstories too based on the facts she researched for a literary journal. Her great grandmother was Swedish, she had arrived in the UK in 1995 when she was 20 to work as an aupair, her grandmother was born 2008, the same day Barack Obama won the elections in the United States, her mother was born 2028 and herself the 7th of September 2049. That made her 35 years old. Tomorrow in fact, she had her 35th birthday tomorrow and she would celebrate it with her two collegues who was specialized in the 1980s and her younger brother Graham at her mothers farmrestaurant a bit outside of town. This morning she wrote on a little shortstory about a 15 year old Swedish girl who lived in Gothenburg and her nearly failed newyearsparty the year 2000, it was due to the literary magazine tonight so she was a bit frustrated and stressed. She, as always, wanted it to have a poetic artistic emotion and be somewhat factually correct. She had been in Gothenburg just the one time so she struggled with the description of the location of Järntorget and its surroundings. It had changed a lot in the last 80 years. She found some pictures online in the end. Not of that new years eve, she hadn’t got the time to search through that but she got the idea of it.
Karin stood at Järntorget and it was 20 minutes to 12 the year 2000. Her feet was freezing and she tried despararatly to call her older sister Sanna who actually got into the club. 20 minutes until the beginning of the new era and she was standing outside. She almost wished she had stayed at home with her mum and dad this felt like such a waste of time. She had 20 minutes left to find something or other that made this night special, the way it should be. She gave up calling Sanna, getting inside was probably not the option. Everybody standing around her was terribly drunk, she was sober. She looked up at the sky, the rockets had started to light it up by impatient people. She looked at her watch, 19 minutes now. She wished she had got invited to some party at least. A car passed by, it blaired “The Final Countdown” by Europe. Tutututu, tututututu. The view of the longhaired singer of that band came as a horried vision of her classmate Fredrik who always was a trouble and loved hardrock. Karin wondered what he might be doing tonight, he probably got hold of some booze and was at some other longhaired friends place. She made an ugly face at the thought. She decided to walk away from the square to maybe find a bench or somewhere where she could sit and quitly adjust to the new millenium. 18 minutes now. She started to run. She had to hurry. Suddenly she stept on something and fell hands down to the ground. She yelled. No one seemed to care even if she gave out a loud scream. It was a digital camera she had stepped on. Karin looked around, it didn’t seem to belong to anyone nearby. She was a bit angry at it, her right mitten had got a hole in it and she was bleeding. But still it was something, maybe this was her mission, she had 17 minutes to take the perfect milleniumphotograph. Who care who it belonged to, this was a way to capture the moment! But where to find the perfect idea? She looked around. To take a picture of someone just young, silly and drunk was not the option. Then…a bit further away she saw a shadow just stepping down from the tram. It was a very, very old man who looked a bit russian she thought because he had both a fur and a furhat. He was standing quite still as if like nothing of this stress of the perfect moment mattered. He looked at his watch and so did Karin, 15 minutes now. Then their eyes met and they both smiled timidly and said “Happy new year”. Karin thought…
Stellas phone ran, it was her mother. Her mother and father had adjusted to the uprising ecological, environmental and energysaving thoughts that had in fact began much earlier than the 2040s, even her grandmother had been committed to environmental thoughts, and the farm had been in the family since 2028 when her grandparents, who met and got to be a couple early in their 20s, decided to have a go at living simple but creative with all the technology that the life of 2028 demanded. It was not being outside of commercialism, it was the new wave of the young wanted to have a lot of time thinking and a little less material things. They met at artschool but stopped and then worked with selling the new artscene all during the 30s online on a choosy global marketsite and they both worked and created within a group called “The another way to look”. They did some interesting work and lived on it, even if it was now regarded as a bit dated.
It was 6.30pm and Stella was in a hurry, her two collegues would arrive any minute, her brother called and said he took an earlier train, she dressed up in a dress that was a copy of the swingperiod from the 1920s or more to say the 2060s, everything in fashion was copies of the 20th century somehow and a nice designer she liked called Sullivan Straught had only made 20s dresses in a period in the 2060s, she was quite thin and the dress suited her. The 2060s parties was quite famous, a lot of young people had started to have international very VIP parties where you have to be a member for having had a speciality in knowledge so the conversation would be interesting, it was cheap to travel so the locations where all over the world and she was lucky and had attended one in her childhood when her mother had written a series of philosophical articles about “the modern search for enlightment in the diffused 21st century”. Even if Stella was a specialist in the early century and not in the 2060s that was a period that had been a peak for the worlds intellectuals and it was in that time she was a teenager and it had a large inpact on her life. The doorbell rang, it was Kathleen. She had just written a book about the commercial lovesongs and their everlastning banal repetition up to the present day. It had quite a bite. Kathleens boyfriend played piano and had just cut a record. His compositions was not new, nothing was totally new, but he still managed to make it original in a way. He worked with the concept “ popular flowmusic” as the journalists had called it, it was not pop nor cut up samples from the 20th century that still had such an impact on modern music, they worked more with simplistic long pieces that inspired deep thought if you listened to it in headphones in deserted places. That was in fashion at the moment together with “random music”, who worked with computerprogrammed samplecompositions chosen first randomly and then adjusted. The people listening to flow and the people listening to random took two stands on modern young life. Either they searched for calmness in understanding the concepts of postpostmodern living and it was a way to be secure, or it was a music portraying in an original way the rather hopeless knowledge of finding something new to do in the world, the concept of endless repetition of the 20th century. Stella found some random rather good and some flow rather good. Of course there was a large majority who still liked traditional vers/melody/verse songs, but it was not what was trendy.
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