Today's forecasters conjure up predictions from their weather maps, or furtively extract the future from computer print-outs. In times long gone, however, such predictive skills were sometimes quite innate. Mother Shipton, for example, used to specialise in very longrange forecasts, and in many spheres her record is impressive. She was born Ursula Southeil in 1486, and lived for 80 years or thereabouts in the little town of Knaresborough in Yorkshire. It is said that her arrival in this world came about as a result of her teenage mother having dallied with the Prince of Darkness on a stormy night.
Be that as it may, young Ursula grew up to be a strange, unworldly creature, who recorded her visions of the future in iambic verse. In 1512 she married a carpenter called Toby Shipton, who appears to have contributed nothing more to history than to provide his wife with the name by which we know her now. Mother Shipton was remarkably percipient about the future of technology, particularly when one recalls that she was writing in the 16th century. Take, for example, her notions on likely developments in transport and communications:
Carriages shall without any horses go,
Causing accidents to fill the world with woe;
Around the world of an instant thoughts shall fly
In less time than the twinkling of an eye.
She has proved to be equally accurate on such widely diverse topics as ladies fashions, mechanised farming, aviation, the cinema, and submarines:
For in those wondrous far-off days,
The women shall adopt a craze
To dress like men, and trousers wear,
And to cut off their locks of hair;
And roaring monsters, with men atop,
Shall seem to eat the verdant crop.
And men shall fly as birds do now,
And give away the horse and plough.
Pictures shall come alive with movements free,
And boats, like fishes, swim beneath the sea.
So perhaps we ought to take heed when Mother Shipton gives us what might appear to be a doleful premonition of a greenhouse world :
The tides will rise beyond their ken
To bite away the shores, and then,
The flooding waters rushing in,
Will flood the lands with such a din
That mankind cowers in muddy fen
And snarls about his fellow men.
Not every land on earth will sink;
Those that do not will stench and stink,
Of rotting bodies of beast and man,
And vegetation crisped on land.