Busted: I took a trip to the year 3000
Qatar 2022 may have gone, but will never be forgotten
The band Busted were just here with their flux-capacitor thing and they whisked me off to the year 3000. An amazing number of boy bands were to be seen and we looked at nostalgia in public culture, with people in that far-off time recalling the stories they’d heard about a thing called the Qatar World Cup in 2022. You might have thought that nearly a thousand years of time might have drawn a misty veil over the tournament’s achievements, but, no, quite the contrary: the 2022 World Cup is as fresh in the minds of the kids of the year 3000 as it is in all our minds right now! Impressive, eh?
Oh, what did they recall about it, do I hear you ask?
- A Qatar sports ambassador saying that homosexuality was “damage in the mind”, whereas everyone knows it’s a happy state outside of any free will and that anyone homing in on it in such aggressive terms is simply looking to pick a fight. [They wanted to travel back with me and Busted to punch his nose, but there wasn’t any room in the back of the DeLorean because we had the dog with us.]
- The death rate among construction workers: they asked if each country whose workers had perished were in some secret championship to rack up the highest possible deaths of workers in some perverse side-bet with a gambling house. Of course, I assured them that crooked betting had nothing whatsoever to do with anything in 2022!
- Sepp Blatter staunchly defending his position that there was nothing wrong with choosing Qatar as a venue, and then telling everyone it was a mistake, which in 3000 is seen as proof positive that the sadly mistaken can be brought to recognise how wrong they were. In 3000, he’s known as “St. Sepp of Blätterteig”.
- A German supermarket pulling its sponsorship of the nation’s side to protest at narrow-minded bigotry in the face of on-field penalty threats against captains for failing to stop the outrageous practice of sympathising with oppressed people who live in fear of their lives for having a sexual orientation that isn’t the national sexual orientation – which they said, according to Kevin Spacey and an old movie “House of Cards”, is actually “power”. The supermarket is known in 3000 as “St Raver of Germany”. [I told them to change the spelling.]
They added that they loved the annual re-runs of Penny’s “Riss” video, asked if I could forward a new print, as it was wearing thin, and added that it explained how, in 3000, the German supermarkets are revered as the social leaders of conscience and right-mindedness, and I said that that certainly hadn’t changed since 2022. Thanks to Penny, in the year 3000, every city in the world has a Penny Lane. I told them I would give my regards to Penny and thanked them for this homage to The Beatles. [They didn’t seem to know who The Beatles were.]
Finally, I asked them if they liked the football we played in 2022. “Football?” they replied. “What’s that?”
Here’s what people will be watching in the year 3000: