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Fantasy Feast 2000
Location: It is 1 January 2000. Twelve of us have gathered on the Moon, to watch earthrise. We sit on a gigantic Persian carpet, with a picnic hamper in front of each guest. The silence is ethereal, the spectacle of the Blue Planet literally out of this world.

Guests:

Eve: mother to us all, they say. I would like her to see what has become of her line - and to explain that diving into the fruit platter and allowing us all access to knowledge was a great move.

Salah al Din: (also see the Syria report) better known in the West as Saladin. The military genius who was the crusaders' most effective - and chivalrous - foe.

Saint Francis of Assisi: A man with a magnetic personality, advocating fraternal charity and total poverty for his followers. He was a lover of life and nature, which he saw as a mirror of God. I expect him to take particular pleasure in observing distant Earth.

Sir Walter Raleigh: The English adventurer and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Among other things, he was a soldier, sailor, captain of the Queen's guard, explorer and relatively humane coloniser of the New World.

Tatanka Iyotake, better known as Sitting Bull: the Teton Dakota Indian chief under whom the Sioux tribes finally united in their struggle for survival on the Great Plains. A man of great courage and wisdom, his visions led to the defeat of hotheaded General Custer at the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull was a loving father of his people, a singer of songs, and a profoundly spiritual man.

Sir Winston Churchill (see Influences): The man who led Britain - and the free world - from near defeat to victory in World War II. I loved the Toad-like bombast and bravado of the early years, but have been moved to tears when reading some of his speeches. His use of English defies description. [See Personal, 'Family'.]

Amelia Earhart: Crossed the gender divide in her Lockheed Electra. The first woman to fly the Atlantic alone.

Rachel Carson (see Influences): was a prophet in very much the same way that Sitting Bull was. Happily, her warning in books like The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring were soon headed - indeed, her work catalysed the birth of the environmental movement. Something of an ecological saint, her writing was pure poetry.

Katherine Hepburn: Has a special place in my affections. I have always loved cantankerous women. A spirited actress, with more than a touch of Yankee eccentricity.

Joyce Grenfell: whose comic monologues might need to be explained to the likes of Eve, Salah al Din and Tatanka Iyotake. Her idea of happiness was the "sublime moment when you got out of your corsets at night."

Toad of Toad Hall: the modern immortal of Wind in the Willows fame, representing all amphibians and the web of life, celebrating the technology that got us to the Moon ("Toot, Toot!") and savouring the waters as no human could.

Seating Plan:
Given the guest list, it is hardly surprising that we decide that the rules must be broken. Once the group hologram has been created for the purposes of Fantasy Feast 2000, we spring a pleasant surprise: one of the hampers turns out to be a version of Dr Who's Tardis - disgorging the families of each of our guests, plus (to remind us of what it was like) each guest at the age of seven.

Toast:
Before we propose the toast, we watch beamed-in contributions from:

Several of the astronauts and cosmonauts (including Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel in space, in 1961), who were the first to see Earth from outside.
Professor James Lovelock (see Influences), on his Gaia theory, explaining how the world works together as if it were a single living entity.
And from Stewart Brand (see Influences) and his colleagues at the Foundation for the Long Now, where they are planning to build the clock that will tell time for the next 10,000 years - and remind us, in the process, of the need to think long term.

Then the three-fold toast is proposed:

To Gaia, to those who push the envelope - and to our common future.