Ben Burbridge, Kyrin Chen, Sasha Ercole,
Moritz Tibes, Vi Trinh, Grabriela Avila Yiptong
it’s not crocs. it’s timeless, it’s Lindy.

(Voice Over)

The initial invitation was to talk about education in the future as though I were in the future. I loved that idea but found I couldn’t quite do it.

(V.O.)

The fact I couldn’t quite do it was interesting, I think, and probably says a lot about the effects of working in education in the present, along with lots of other things.

(V.O.)

To be clear, it was so nice to receive the invitation. I just didn’t feel I could convincingly be a person from the future because I could not imagine what it would feel like to inhabit the future, or at least the future I hope for; or rather, I could not imagine it with quite the same conviction I have at other times, and that felt like a problem.

(V.O.)

I wrote something before — six months of research leave; it was summer; the left was in an ascendant position; I was swimming in the sea every day; working by an open window in a public library; reading lots; writing in a way that didn’t feel pressured; my job felt secure; and I thought, “yeah, the future could feel a bit like this.”

(V.O.)

The invitation came in the middle of strike action, when I can barely imagine a world in which I keep my pension and my pay keeps up with inflation; I’ve been Head of Department for two years, signing off occupational health reports for colleagues who have been systematically ground down by working in HE; and awaiting a doctor’s appointment about my own stress and anxiety, in search of a chemical fix to what I know to be social problems, because I have so little faith in things getting better any time soon.

(V.O.)

I realised the only way I was going to be able to do this was via some sort of device — to stage, partially overcome, and ultimately lament my inability to convincingly inhabit that future.

(V.O.)

So I decided to describe the experiences of a person in the future who happens accidentally upon a video of me giving the talk. It’s not that she is interested in the talk; she watches it out of a combination of pity and morbid curiosity.

(V.O.)

Maybe she’s annoyed at times, but ultimately she finds it faintly and unintentionally comic. It is so pitiable in its inability to fully project itself into the future; and that capacity to laugh at that inability would further signal something important about the gap between the present and the future.

London. 6:30 p.m. 16 March 2042. A young woman sits in her bedroom.

Music playing. Skinning up. A warm early spring evening drifts through the open window. The sound of children playing outside. Choral singing from down the road.

She is practising a transcendental meditation technique that requires her to describe her experiences, moment by moment, in the third person.

(End of excerpt)