Friday, 16th. October 2026

Yesterday was a day of recovery; it has worked well and as a result I am feeling quite good. Cloudless blue sky and sunlight helps, so a good day to make it into town to meet mum. This will be the first time I have met her since she became 90 years old! As ever, I am hopeful I can achieve that goal and still be here typing something like this in 2046.

I am thinking again about my Last 20 Years project – my 2026-46 diary – which is beginning to come into focus and which I think could be interesting. It will replace my Morning Thoughts From A Devon Sitting Room series with a new focus on how the past helps me through what I anticipate will be the last 20 years of my life, should I achieve the record set by my mother.

Part of the story will be to focus on the final two decades in terms of health, housing, climate, technology, society and government. It is almost tempting to merge that story with the Second Dark Age synopsis; this is something I have been thinking and writing about for over a decade now. It has been my belief that we are approaching a Dark Age that exhibits many of the similarities of the medieval Dark Ages – odd on the face of it as we live in a so-called ‘information age’. However, it is also a ‘disinformation age’ resulting in division, ignorance and alternative realities. Dark Age One was not entirely dark – as historians are increasingly finding – and I suspect (hope?) that the sequel will likewise be not as dark.

However, I digress. Regarding my Last 20 Years My feeling – and I suspect the expectations of most people – is that my health will decline. I shall record this decline but, as ever, it is likely to include ups and downs and hopefully will not be a story of one long continuous period of decline. My financial and therefore housing situation could become difficult – even traumatic. It seems likely that as climate change brings an ever-increasing severity and unpredictability of weather systems, this will become a factor affecting health, particularly given the inevitable disruption to food, water and energy supplies. I can make certain predictions like these and my diary will record if they come to pass – and when.

Above all I want to take the long view and not be swayed necessarily by temporary perturbations. The long view will provide a better indication of where we are going and what we realistically should prepare for. At the end of the day I have known what is coming with some clarity since the beginning of the 21st. century, and very little in the last quarter-century – if anything – has caused me to change the long view in my mind. The one thing I cannot be sure of is dates, and that is what my diary is for.