I’ve got the go-ahead for a new book, which is a good thing, but every time I write something it happens. This is not supposed to happen.

The latest example is a story today in the newspaper about Personalised Health and Care 2020, which suggests that family doctors should prescribe apps to patients in the future. My chapter on health was entitled “Your doctor is an app.”

This situation slightly reminds me of William Gibson, the science fiction writer, who several years ago allegedly announced that he was no longer writing about the future because the present was becoming quite weird enough.

“Without a sense of how weird the present is — how potentially weird the present is — it became impossible for me to judge how much weirder I should try to make an imagined future”

So what to do? One solution might be to pitch things much further into the future, but this runs the risk of sounding like a science fiction writer, which I am clearly not. When people ask me to talk about the future they usually mean a chewable, understandable future that is somewhat trend-based and logical. If you go too far out people complain that it’s either too speculative (that’s the whole point!) or not something that is practically applicable (why does it have to be?).

Perhaps the answer is to move backwards. To use a mirror rather than a crystal ball – the future an excuse to discuss what we are doing right now, which is possibly back to the central purpose of science-fiction.

BTW, exchange on the train yesterday: A somewhat grubby man with one arm got on-board and asked, nicely, for some money. Everyone on the train looked downwards to avoid eye contact. I gave him about five quid and the man thanked me and shuffled off. The man seated opposite to me then said: “He’ll probably just spend it on drugs” to which my response was: “Well that’s more or less what I spend it on.”

(Children, if you are reading this, this was a far too obscure reference to alcohol, coffee and perhaps legal painkillers. I am not, yet, a crack addict).