Colm O'Regan: 'What will 22.2.2222 be like?'
Pic: Roger Kenny
Last Wednesday was rare. February 2nd, 2022.
Did you remember to clink a glass at 22.22, 2/2/2022? Personally, I prefer to wait for a couple of weeks’ time: for 22.22 22/2/2022. And it’s on a Twosday.
A rarity like this gets a man thinking about other remarkable dates. We’ll never have 'The Ones’ lined up again, not since shortly after ten past eleven on the eleventh of November 1111.
It was a Saturday, so I presume the peasants were making the most of it. Although they had to work for the cruel Baron that day so maybe they were only having the One.
1111 was a fairly non-descript year in general. Reeling in the Years -with its largely Gregorian chant sound-track- would have had footage of Crusaders doing a spot of besieging in Lebanon, a Holy Roman Emperor being crowned, the fairies turning the milk sour. That kind of thing.
Here in Ireland, a king called Domhnall Ua Briain from Munster became King of the Hebrides, making Ireland great again no doubt, and all the boundaries for our dioceses were largely decided at the synod of Rathbreasil.
Also, there were sod-turning ceremonies for both the National Children’s Hospital and Cork Convention Centre.
But what about in future? What will the 22nd of February, 2222 be like? It’s a big year for Star Trek fans. 2222 is the year Montgomery Scott will be born. The person everyone asked to beam them up.
And once Scottie grows up enough to operate a teleportation device, the rest of Star Trek (or Star Trak as it’s called by Irish people for reasons that have never been clear) tips away merrily from about 2260 onwards.
But what about scientific prediction? Wikipedia is cagey enough. There’s no specific mention of 2222. A few comets will return. 2285 is a biggie. Easter will be on March 22nd! The earliest it can be. So you might start booking Centre Parcs now for that week after St Patrick’s Day.
Other websites are a bit more relaxed about speculation. Futuretimelines.net reckons envisages a utopia where we’ll have adapted to climate change, will hardly have to work and have the ultimate freedom to pursue our greatest dreams and aspirations. So based on the current trajectory, that means we will be all thoroughly miserable.
Most predict websites give the impression we’ll have ‘come out the other side’ of all the shite we think is headed our way in the next 100 years. That is comforting. But it supposes we’ll be better people. I’m not so sure of that. We seem to go in cycles of acting the maggot.
For anyone feeling miserable about biodiversity loss though, the writer predicts we’ll be rewilding most of the planet although here in Ireland we’ll still be bulldozing ditches during nesting season ‘to piss off the vegans’.
And Sunday the third of March 3033? The predictions are rarer. Pop band Busted’s in the song Year 3000 (TWENTY years old this year FFS) they predicted we’d be living underwater, there’d be 'triple breasted women' and they’d be 'outselling Michael Jackson'.
By the time the Jonas Brothers covered this in 2006, only the underwater detail remained. Ah, they were different times you see.
Elsewhere writers predict we’ll have colonised space, there’ll be vertical farms, blockchain everywhere, (and we still won’t understand it), climate control. Or we’ll have destroyed ourselves with a new weapon.
But I know you’ll want to know, so I’ve done some digging and… Easter Sunday 3033 is on the 7th of April.
