In 100 days will the world be different?

March 5, 2010, No comments

Three months and a week doesn’t sound like a momentous time-frame until you rephrase it to be 100 days. Ever since President Roosevelt II set about rebuilding America in his first hundred days, that has been taken as the yardstick for judging anyone and everyone. But what about looking ahead? How will the world change in the next one hundred days? Here are some possibilities:

1. All the bankers give their bonuses to charity
2. No-one cries when giving a speech at the Oscars
3. Mr Gaddafi releases the Swiss hostage, sorry ‘justly convicted prisoner’
4. Ex-President Bush apologises for the Iraq War
5. Every child remembers that it’s Mother’s Day
6. Gordon Brown is re-elected
7. The Daily Mail prints something worth reading
8. Congress passes President Obama’s healthcare bill
9. Someone reading this wins the lottery
10. The Pope says that it’s okay to be gay

Of course, none of those are likely to come true. We live in the real world not an ideal one. But even if all those ten were to happen, would our lives be better? Some would, of course, but for most of us it would be business as usual. So let’s be positive and look at ten things that are far more certain to happen:

1. The World Cup will begin in South Africa
2. Millions of people will commemorate Jesus resurrecting himself
3. Millions more will understand the true meaning of Easter and eat too much chocolate
4. Peter André will be hugely overpaid for an underwhelming autobiography
5. Thousands of bankers will be hugely overpaid for doing next to nothing
6. Colin Firth will win an Oscar for Best Actor (okay, so that one is wishful thinking)
7. Britain’s Liberal Democrats will not win the General Election
8. The clocks will move forward an hour
9.  35,301,500 babies will be born worldwide
10.  My book  will be published

As certain as all of those seem at the moment, I can be sure of only one, the last one. It’s been over 700 days since I wrote the first line at the 2008 Geneva Writers’ Conference, but Swiss Watching is finally almost there. Today I saw the final cover. All bar two of the photos are mine, so it’s an achievement in itself:

If you can’t wait 100 days to order it, and I can barely wait that long to see it in its final form, then you can already pre-order online, whether you live in the UK, US, Switzerland, France, Germany, or Canada. But the big question is, what will you do with the next 100 days? You might not be able to change the world, but you could change your part of it.