The year 2020 was burned into my consciousness as far back as 2006 when I first set up my 2020 Visions blog.

It seemed a significant milestone in my own life and its association with ‘vision’ also made it sound like a significant milestone  in the future of humanity. Indeed, the three core themes of the 2020 Expo – Opportunity, Sustainability and Mobility – sought to provide an optimistic outlook for the challenges facing global societies.

However, 2020 will now forever be associated with the start of the first, and hopefully last, pandemic of the 21st Century and has marked its significance in our world’s history for reasons doubtless not predicted by the majority of futurists.

If there was one thing that I remember from trying to anticipate and predict how the 2010s might progress, it was how many times the world had to deal with unpredictable events.

In terms of anticipation and prediction of my own future, in a post I wrote in 2009 called ’10 Hopes for the Tens’ I expressed a hope that a cure would be found for my progressive and profound deafness. I was thinking more along the lines of genetic therapy or engineering but in the 5th week of 2020 our wonderful NHS gave me a cochlear implant operation. Again, an increase in Government funding for this amazing technology and a lowering of the thresholds for qualification meant this happened 10 years earlier than I had personally anticipated.

The implant was switched on 3 weeks later and then 3 weeks after that the UK entered its first COVID-19 lockdown. I still feel immensely lucky that I had the operation when I did as the waiting list for this type of surgery is now enormous.

It took over 12 months for me to learn to hear electronically again and so the delay of Dubai 2020 Expo by a year due to the pandemic is in some ways fortuitous as I am now visiting it with my hearing abilities as good as they were 30 years ago.

Another aspect of my 2020 Visions blog and my hopes for the 2010s was the progression of my daughters to adulthood.

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