On New Year’s Eve 2021, probably because some other doughnut in a newspaper said it was a fun idea, the family all wrote down predictions for the year ahead and sealed them in a box. When we opened them at the weekend, it turned out my son hadn’t done one at all, hadn’t even put a decoy in, and it’s a mystery how he got away with it, given we were all sitting right there. So now I’m looking forward to his career in magic. The youngster, even though 13 is not that young, misunderstood the concept of a prediction, and instead included her ambitions for a multiplayer video game that she no longer plays.
So that left three: I had said I thought Covid would be seen as no different from a cold, that nobody would self-isolate or even test any more, and everything would be completely normal. Mr Z’s was in two parts – Liz Truss would be prime minister, and Ukraine would be further annexed. The other 15-year-old had said she would always have £100 in her bank account.
And so the hair-splitting began. Obviously Liz Truss is not prime minister, and “annexed” is too formal and coherent a term for the Russian incursions into Ukraine. Equally obviously, Truss was for a bit, and Russia has invaded, and thus this should be classed as prescience. I disputed this on a technicality, that the only measure of a prediction is if it’s true, although my real objection was that I think he manifests these negative events with the power of his pessimism.
Covid, meanwhile, has gone the way I said, but I omitted one crucial element: that while we treat it like a cold, it remains nothing like a cold. So “completely normal” is really “existing in a state of suspended denial”, a circumstance I have manifested with the power of my inane optimism.
The 15-year-old, though, does have £100 in her bank account; she got a job, and even better than that, it’s in a posh butcher. She literally brings home the bacon.
Overall, I would say that this wheeze was a little bit chilling, a little bit divisive, not that fun. The take-home is: think twice before you listen to a doughnut in a newspaper.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
