It's got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good

The client's brief was clear enough: "Predict coming trends in personal transport". Any of us who invested heavily in the flying car industry, only to lose our stake due to lack of consumer demand for the product, can sympathise with the client's desires.

One thing we have learned in the past is not to heed predictions from Space-Time Eddie, no matter how confidently he couches them in a sepia cloud of bafflegab about 'nostalgia for infancy". "The future lies with the Perambulance", sez Eddie -- "the merging of the tricycle and the rubber baby buggy bumpers". He is too easily led astray by his own nostalgia for his career as a stunt baby.*

Another Kiwi and I maintain that Eddie should not have left his blueprints overnight filed next to a copy of L. P. Hartley's "The Travelling Grave", and the resulting conceptual bleed-through and morphogenic crossover is entirely his own fault.

Certainly he should not blame us and our corner-paring, cheese-cutting preoccupation with cost reduction for the disappearance from his design of useful but expensive fripperies such as "wheels" and "front window".

At least tigris has taken the certainty of rising sea levels into account for her scenario.

Another thing we have learned is not to describe the Riddled Futurology and Life-Styles Working Group as a "think tank". To do so is to exert a strong influence -- not necessarily a benign one -- upon the design of the Working Group's offices.

The members do not need roof-top landing strips for personal jets and Another Kiwi is adamant that they must move back to the old premises. It may have had its drawbacks (like being lowered into a well as the only way to enter or leave), and contemporary architects will sneer at the feather-waving gargoyles, but just look at the state-of-the-art flying envelope e-mail protocol!

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* Stunt baby.