Welcome to the 2222 British Isles literary study cruise. We will soon be passing by the tiny islands of St Catherine’s, Boscombe, Pokesdown, Hengistbury and of course our destination Southbourne. If the seas stay calm we will be landing for our visit to the National Trust property, the newly restored Tidalscribe House. Has anyone actually been on land before? No I thought not, make sure you take your land nausea tablets as soon as we get the berthing go ahead and before you leave the lecture theatre.

The twenty third century has brought many exciting discoveries, not least of which was the decoding of ‘The Internet’ which turned out to be real, not a myth at all, with the discovery of more historic documents than we could have dreamed of. For students of literature, just as exciting was the unearthing of the ‘voices’ of the early twenty first century when people still lived on land. At last it has been proved that far from ambling mindlessly towards global disaster, vast numbers of ordinary citizens were intercommunicating with the rest of the world and trying to counteract the ignorance of bumbling world leaders.

A lot of citizens wrote what they called ‘blogs’ and ‘websites’. As well as exchanging information they had a highly developed culture of writing, often issuing books on primitive hand held electronic devices.

Today’s lecture is about an author who has not come down to us through history, but was discovered by sheer accident. When at last in recent years a select group of scientists and academics were allowed on land, they chose an island that seemed to have largely escaped the destructive storms of the twenty first and twenty second centuries. The 2029 forced emergency evacuation of the then south coast left houses as if the owners had just stepped out. In one of the houses was found a vast collection of paper books apparently all written by Janet Gogerty. Just as our ancestors did, the scientists tried an internet search and discovered Janet Gogerty had a website called Tidalscribe. She had written thousands of blogs as well as ‘publishing’ many novels and short story collections. If her writing is to be believed, her life and times were much stranger than we have imagined, but her novel Three Ages of Man is uncannily accurate in describing ‘the future’, our life and times. This is the book you will be studying in detail on your degree course.

When we enter the house you will see the author’s book collection in hermetically sealed cases, but the National Trust has preserved the house as close as possible to the way it was left. On her desk sits the antique computer, beside it a half full cup of what is believed to have been coffee, not a banned substance then. Also handwritten notes on paper, faded and barely legible in a strange script, which leads us to wonder if they were intended to be transcribed as her next book or were some mystery message to the future. We will never know what happened to her after she left her home, was she one of the minority that survived?