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by writing a short story or an essay of not more than 2000 words about Britain In The Year 2000, which is twenty years from now.
    1980. Year that Anna Hardie, a prizewinning writer about what life will be like in twenty years’ time, unbends the leg of a paperclip and threads it through one of her ears in Versailles, France, infecting the ear, giving herself a slight fever and having to start a course of antibiotics three days and a couple of countries later, in Brunnen, Switzerland, where the views of the mountains and the lakes, and of the mountains in the lakes, are stunning.
    But first: London, Paris, Versailles. The fifty prizewinning writers about the future are on their fourth day. On day two every-one woke up to find that he or she was now one of
    the party-people, or
    the weirdo swots, or
    the total outsiders.
    Already Anna has been goosed, for the first time in her life, by a seventeen-year-old weirdo swot (who, in twenty years’ time, will have become an internationally renowned Professor of Theoretical Physics). At the time of it happening she has no idea that this is what’s happening; the inexplicable pain between her buttock and her thigh and the red-haired blushing boy-man with bad eczema behind her seem in no way related, though later in the fortnight she will see him stand close to the back of one of the other girls and see the other girl leap in the air away from him, and then she will understand. Already the nastier of the party-people have got another of the weirdo swots drunk by spiking his drink at supper in the Paris hotel, have held him down drunk in one of the bedrooms and have shaved off one half of his little RAF-war-hero moustache. He is wandering lopsidedly about in the summer haze at Versailles Palace today, a single-winged recording angel. Why would he not just shave the whole thing off? she wonders. Is it so that the people who did it to him will be made to face their meanness every time they see him? Or because he doesn’t want to lose the half he’s got so he can reconstruct the other exactly? Anna doesn’t know. She hasn’t spoken to him. (She has hardly spoken to anyone.) She knows his name is Peter, and that he had announced to everybody at the Medieval Banquet on day one in London that he was especially looking forward to Versailles, to seeing the historic mirror room where the peace treaty was signed at the end of the First World War. Ironic, the thought of him seeing his own war-wound in every one of those huge tarnished mirrors.
    Anna is one of the total outsiders.
    This is because she is the only Scot on the tour and all forty-nine of the others are loudmouthed scary confident articulate English people. (It might also be because she had food poisoning after the Medieval Banquet and spent a lot of the first evening of initial group formation by herself, in the hotel room in their hotel in Bayswater, throwing up.)
    Right now she is sitting tearing little bits off the french stick that came with the packed lunch and putting them into her mouth. She is at the side of a huge lake with an elaborate fountain in the middle of it. Are its gold horses struggling like that, their hooves and mouths and manes all panic, because they’re scared that they’ll sink to oblivion, or because coming back to the surface after being down in the deep is so terrifying?
    There are eleven days, including today, left.
    Today is only partially over.
    Roughly one-third of today is over.
    What if the bus the fifty future-writers are all crossing Europe in crashes on this tour and they all die and she never gets home again?
    If she had her passport she could go home. She could just go back to the hotel in Paris, pick up her bag and go. She could leave a note at reception saying somebody at home is ill, or that she’s had a bad dream about the family and because her dreams are so strong and intuitive she has decided she’d better return home immediately even though nobody has phoned for her or anything.