So you’ll be doing some good, too! Sounds too good to miss, if you ask me.”I must say, I leapt at it. “There you’ve got me,” he said, taking the glossy brochure out of his upper pocket “Ah, that’s it – World Poverty,” he continued “It’s a United Nations beano on World Poverty. When young Leeson’s hoots of laughter had died down, he managed to gather himself sufficiently to garnish me with some further details.
“It’ll be a real smasher of a conference, Wallace,” he told me, “20,000 people expected, all the top dogs, no expense spared – and Copenhagen’s a haven of restaurants.” “Sounds rather me,” I replied, tentatively “But what’s the subject?”Leeson looked temporarily stumped. “Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen!” I jested, for I am blessed with a pleasant singing voice.

It was while talking a few months back to one of these smartly dressed young directors – a Mr Nicholas Leeson – that it was first hinted to me that I might care to represent the board at the forthcoming summit in Copenhagen. MY OWN good self and my fellow directors of the Independent are all now listed each day on the editorial page, there for all our loyal readers to marvel at our shining claims to integrity, courage and good old British pluck. What lies out there, beyond the light of the campfire, is an abstraction which returns no answer and promises no favours in spite of all the delights which human beings fling into that darkness I wish I still had my gold watch.. The past may be another country, but at least we have seen it and there is some notion about what pleases ancestors and heroes there. But the future is dark, and perhaps implacable.Why have we suddenly begun to use the words “out there” – as in “millions of potential customers out there”, or, more ominously, “something on the move out there”? The phrase is about a new fear of the unknown with its invisible face which may be smiling or snarling. And yet the future is that region about which we know little or nothing.

How do we suck up to it? What pleases it – human sacrifice, or a burnt-offering of elephant tusks seized from African poachers? Hammering a thousand “decommissioned” Armalites to scrap, or incinerating a billion Baring pounds into the ash of cyberspace?There is no safe answer. That bargain ran like this: I dedicate a bit of the present to the past, in order to win something in the future: a good harvest, a safe birth, a happy afterlife for a dead child.But sacrifice these days is made directly to the future. Lewis Carroll’s quote “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today” may be Victorian in origin but it is a cultural motto for our own times.Once people withdrew precious things from circulation out of respect for the past. They put them with a past person, in a grave; they offered them to ancestral family or clan ghosts, or to items of landscape which seemed to have existed for all time. The future was involved in this process of offering, but only as the other half of a bargain. Aware of those facts, most people will be shocked by the brutal iconoclasm of Professor Wilfred Beckerman, who was quoted last week in the Guardian asking why we suppose that future generations have any rights – especially to resources which could be exploited right now But Beckerman asked the right question, all the same.