What the World will be Like in 2010

“In four or five years it'll be open”, the lady in the information booth answered.

"The building work on the metro station across the road should have started by now but the mayor stalled it until after the municipal elections". He’ll have his reasons.

I don’t mind waiting. Until then I’ll sweep about on the motorbike. What got me was the day they started revving chainsaws outside my window. Just like the lady going down in the lift, I wondered why they were cutting down the trees in the park outside my house.

Little men walked, almost choreographed, between dumpers and diggers on the canvass that was my fifth floor view of the park below. They logged the trunks into manageable chunks which metal arms loaded onto waiting lorries.

All we have now are the memory of tree trunks in the shape of mammoth foot prints that punched clay holes into the tarmac. Here and there a trunk survives, shorn level with the ground. The rings can not be much more than thirty. “They’re cutting them down to work on the metro station” an old man who leaned on a cane told me.

Old people know. They do not know because they have grown intelligent. They know because the have spent time finding out. They have lived. For better or for worse, it’s the living that colours their view, or simply blurs it.

An old man in the park the other day told me that infants are more advanced than they were when he was at that age. “In the forties”, he said “children weren’t allowed out of the house”. I cannot contradict him for I am not yet forty.

“Four or five years” she said. When Line Nine will loop the city from the Baix Llobregat and the airport right round through the highlands of Sarrià and on through Gràcia and Horta along to Sagrera where the yet-to-arrive high speed train will have its home. The great loop like the circle line in London will avoid the centre and bring together the rich and poor the high and the low. It is easy to look towards Plaça Catalunya and forget who’s standing beside you.

In the time it takes to ready the ribbon for cutting on so many new stations the baby boom generation of the late seventies will have left home and set up their own homes. They may well be on to child number two or three. Sarrià, the centre of the city’s fee-paying schooling, will be more connected than ever. House prices may have levelled off. The trees outside my window may be nothing more than saplings and tractor tyre tracks may have given way to a lawn that’s automatically watered at eight o’clock each morning.

The man who sets his fold-up wooden chair facing the steps where he unzips the covers on a long row of budgie cages may well have new birds. Or a new chair, or perhaps a new hobby. Some of the elderly folk who play bowls on the sandy surface in the afternoons may be using magnets on strings to pick up the metal balls they can’t reach down to.

And the metro in itself will not change the way we live, it will open up possibilities that we can opt for or not.

“Four or five years” she said. In the meantime; let’s live. As with money, time now is worth more than time in the future.