As a child growing in the terraced streets and willow-herb wastelands of 1960s Sheffield, there was never any doubt in my unformed, juvenile mind that, should I so desire - and, of course, I would so desire - I might spend my later years - those effortless years of reward and careless luxury - beneath a giant glass dome on the moon; or that I might travel on a silent, hovering skateboard around the outer realms of my homespun galaxy - Rotherham, say, or Barnsley, or even Doncaster; that I would eat three coloured pills a day instead of endless potatoes plus gravy; and that, yes!, I would marry (or, as I would futuristically imagine, mate with) a woman in a silver mini-skirt (called a tunic) whose alluring eyes were ringed with blue, and whose every thought was transmitted to me in breathless waves of sensuous, echoing silence. The future never seemed so beguiling, so desirable or so almost-within-reach as it did then.

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