Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.
Dear Jono,
Happy Borthday! I’ll call you Jono because that’s how four people addressed you – your father, and siblings. Not your mother. For her it was Jonathan. Not your friends; for rhem you were Johnny.
Age one hundred. Plenty of people make this age. Your grandfather got close. Remember him? Born in 1897, served in the First World War, fire warden in the Second.
If you are reading this, then something remarkable has happened. Or not happened. No Third World War, though it looked close in 2026 as the Iran War spiralled out of control and drew others in.
What kept you going? Curiosity and the NHS?
As a boy you used to think about first birthdays a lot. 21 was a big one, and a huge party. Nothing else matched it. Doing anything special for your 100th? skydiving? Scuba diving? A trip to the International Space Station?
If you could reach 105, you might just be able to attend the thousand-year anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 2066. The Norman Conquest has fascinated you. You’re a Vernon, the name comes from a town on the River Seine. Your Viking ancestors took the name. Your ancestors came over ik 1066 and were given much of Cheshire for the trouble. The idea of standing at the far end of a millennium and looking back at it felt like fulfilment of a historians purpose – to tell this 1000 year long story.
Now the real question:
Will you ever get to write 100YON on your blog?
The thought amused you 50 years ago as tou began the 50 Years On challenge – every day, of every diary you ever wrote revisited.
At fourteen you were writing entries about life at in Posh Prison, a boys public school. You wrote:
Monday. Chemistry test. Did badly at maths. Made a pepper pot in metalwork.
And you imagined the absurd extension of the habit:
50YON
75YON
And then the implausible one:
100YON
But here is the thing I want to know.
Did you keep making things?
Did you keep writing the stories?
Did The Form Photo ever settle into its final shape—the strange little constellation of girls, darts, discos, and misunderstandings that once seemed to contain an entire teenage universe? The one where Robbie and Kizzy keep examining the chaos of Easter 1978 like archaeologists of their own youth.
Did you keep drawing trees?
Did you keep walking through woods surveying ancient trees? Are they still there? Or has climate change finished rhem off?
Did you keep coaching swimming for much longer?
Of you are one hundred, what does the world look like now?
Smaller?
Perhaps by now you have stopped worrying about longevity altogether. Perhaps the achievement was never reaching one hundred at all, but simply continuing to notice things—the way a diary writer does, the way an artist does. Curiosity never dies. And on your death bed you’ll still be wondering what you’re going to do with your life.
If by some miracle you reach 2066, will you stand on Senlac Hill and say a prayer even though you’ve not believed in God for 88 years?
You spent a childhood fascinated by that moment. It would be satisfying to nod across a thousand years and say:
I made it this far.
And if you don’t make it to Hastings-plus-a-millennium, that’s all right too.
The real ambition was always smaller and better:
To keep writing the next entry.
Yours,
somewhere in the middle of the story,
Jonathan
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