Ushing for a living

I am employed as a some-time usher at an institution that hosts public events. Tonight we debated the question of  ‘Are Things Getting Better or Worse?’

The two main speakers were a gentleman with exquisitely sculpted hair and excellent trousers and a physicist with a pudding-bowl haircut and floppy leisure pants. The physicist said things are getting better because we know more stuff and will make really good robots to fix everything then the well-trousered-gentleman said things will get worse because of all the ways people could easily use technology to do bad things and anyway climate change and population growth.

I had to dart around with a microphone so that the audience could join in. An orange-haired woman pointed out that better and worse is not at all a clear-cut issue:

there could well be people here who want London to be a clean city full of bike-riding vegetarians - this is my idea of hell

At the end of the talk I stood smiling at the door as everybody filed out or stopped to complain, there was a lady who’d had to sit next to someone eating a muffin and getting drunk and another with deaf aids who couldn’t hear a thing but had hoped for a bit more philosophy.