People seem to like this so I’ll keep it coming…comments very welcome.

In Japan there is a social phenomenon called ‘Hikikomori’. The phrase roughly translates as ‘withdrawal’ and refers to boys who retreat into their bedrooms and rarely, if ever, come out. In one case a young man in his early twenties shut his bedroom door and played video games, watched television and slept for fourteen years. Food was supplied by his mother who lived downstairs, virtually alone. The phenomenon is a particularly Japanese condition although nobody can quite understand who or what is to blame. According to experts there are somewhere between one hundred thousand and one million Hikikomori in Japan, caused by everything from absent (always-working) fathers to over protective mothers.

There are a number of simple explanations for problems like these and most are wrong.Some people blame individualism; others point the figure at urbanisation, technology, education or even government. The reality is it’s all of these but ultimately we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We, and only we, have let this happen. And if it’s like this now what will it be like in another fifty years?

Another snippet from my forthcoming book…

The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed that his biggest problem was “events”. Predicting anything is a recipe for failure and frustration but politics is almost impossible due to such events. Indeed, the only thing that you can say with any degree of certainly about politics is that if you take a long enough timeframe almost anything is possible. Predictions about the end of history now seem as ridiculous as Thomas Jefferson saying that “History, by apprising (people) of the past, will enable them to judge the future: it will avail them of experience of other times and nations”. But if this were true then why did United Nations officials decide to cover up a copy of Picasso’s Guernica, which hung outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, on the very day that Colin Powell addressed the UN about the case for war in Iraq? We are, it seems, destined to repeat past mistakes.

Did you know that I’m writing a book? It’s called Future Files and it’s out on September 3rd. If you can’t wait – or can’t get hold of it – I’ll be dripping a few bits and bobs into my blog from time to time. Here’s a few of the opening lines…

Early in 2006 a middle-aged woman called Joyce Vincent was discovered in her flat in London. She was dead. Nothing remarkable about that, except for the fact that she had been dead for more than two years and her television was still on. How could this happen? Where was everyone? The answer, of course, was that everyone was somewhere else. London, like most major cities, no longer has neighbourhoods; it has collections of individuals leading increasingly isolated, selfish and narcissistic lives. Neighbours keep to themselves and people don’t ask questions or volunteer information. In an age where everyone is increasingly connected to everyone else through the Internet nobody really knows anyone anymore.We have lots of friends but few of them dig deep to understand our hopes and fears. The general feeling is that you’ll live longer if you keep yourself to yourself.