KEY POINTS:
If you fancy something a little more challenging than yet another disgruntled conversation with your anger management counsellor about the vagaries of the weather and feel bold enough to confront the true weirdness of our world, then go to a cricket one day international (ODI). Not to watch
the cricket, or even the crowd. No. The reason you'd go is to listen. Specifically to the music now considered an essential enhancement between overs or whenever something exciting occurs.
Please don't be alarmed. This isn't a Blimpish rant about the vulgarity of modern life.
On the contrary, vulgarity is a fine thing. It would be particularly welcome in realms of earnest fantasy like politics and television weather forecasting.
A bit of slurping and burping and belching and farting - not to mention scanty attire and the scratching of parts - would do wonders for a Budget speech or work of meteorological fiction.
So vulgarity isn't an issue. Rather, if you wish to understand the weirdness of our times, you need only consider the age of the tunes.
Here's just a few of the songs broadcast during the three ODIs played so far this summer: The Beatles' Twist and Shout, The Stones' Brown Sugar, The Doors' Don't Ya Love Her Madly, Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl, Queen's ubiquitous We Will Rock You, The Dudes' Get Yourself Another, Tainted Love by whoever first sang it and even, heaven help us, Smoke on the bleedin' Water. All of which are nearly 40 years old!
This is quite extraordinary. And more to the point, it's a small sign of a larger transformation. To appreciate how weird it is, imagine you're at an ODI in the mid-60s.
At the end of another lethal over from Shane Bond's dad, the crowd's entertained with more fabulous hits from the Roaring 20s; perhaps an Ivor Novello tune or Enrico Caruso on an Edison cylinder.
Nonsense, you say. No self-respecting baby boomer would tolerate the can can, man. Those guys were hippies, not flappers.
Music was huge in the 60s. It was like txting is today - a way to shut the grown-ups out. No acned adventurer embracing the twin delights of puberty and protest would've tolerated Vera Lynn at the cricket, let alone those other geezers!
Yet we do now. We don't think twice about playing 40-year-old music. But we should. Because what's happened since the 60s is a change so fundamental it makes all the bird flu, global warming, gloom and doom headlines look like a backyard cricket match.
For the first time in human history, the population pyramid is upside down. The narrow bit's at the bottom and the broad bit's at the top - at least in the first world. And the event music acutely reflects that.
Put bluntly, we're bonking more but breeding less. While everyone was worrying about Vietnam and the bomb and the effect of eggs on cholesterol, the birth rate in most Western countries has quietly slipped below the level necessary to maintain the population.
And, although immigration's masked that decline, the shortage of cradles has now become grave.
The explanation for this is a radical piece of biological engineering that's reshaped the world; thus making the pill undoubtedly the most important invention of the 20th century. It's had a greater effect - for better and worse - on human lives, lifestyles, attitudes, philosophies and, most importantly, numbers, than either of the other great transformational technologies, namely nuclear energy and the car. And, like them, the pill's now part of our lives and won't go away.
So, be assured, this isn't an argument for returning half the population to a state of reproductive servitude.
But, since this is the time of year when folk make all manner of predictions about this and that, here are a few inspired by those old songs at the cricket and what they tell us about society.
To begin with, multi-culturalism's dead. It doesn't know it yet, but it is. It won't survive the conflicts created by post-pill migration.
As countries like the Netherlands have bolstered their dwindling ranks with those from abroad, so tensions have built; particularly when the newcomers are encouraged to cling to old values, customs and beliefs.
Separatism is a wedge. A nation divided cannot stand. There can't be nations within a nation. That's why the Dutch - and others - are now saying, "We are a liberal, tolerant country and those coming here must accept that. It may not be very liberal or tolerant but that's the deal. If you want Sharia Law, for example, you can have it - somewhere else."
The other, perhaps more significant prediction is that, within a decade, most Western countries will be "buying babies".
Adoption laws will be relaxed and people will be offered financial incentives, either to have children or not to have abortions. Indeed, if a bleary-eyed, insomniac glimpse of a BBC World news item is any guide, the Germans are already doing it.
Now, you might think such predictions are nonsense and 40 years of feminist theory will not be undone so easily. But necessity isn't just the mother of invention. It's also the mother of conception as nations confronted with their own disappearance will discover.
Quite possibly, as the old Stones song - an ODI favourite - would have it, in a Jumping Jack Flash!
