Those who believed size was progress must have thought it represented the future

Those who believed size was progress must have thought it represented the future. As far as we can tell, it was a dispenser of entertainment and news (though they made little distinction between the two in those days) formed by a merger of half a dozen giants. At the time, it must have seemed as if they would live for ever."Dr Hustler picks up a small disc with string wrapped round the middle, which he often likes to play with It is called a "Yo-Yo". Nothing else is known about it, but its sheer lack of function suggests some sort of religious significance."Anyway, we have now discovered that Coke and Pepsi were not the biggest conglomerates to walk the Earth. If our reconstruction is accurate, a far larger one seems to have flourished just after 2000.

Something to do with "paper", perhaps?"The interesting thing is that these monster corporations managed to get big even without any clear function. Several seem to have specialised in making running-shoes, although people took less and less exercise. Two huge corporations, called Pepsi and Coke, did nothing but sell fizzy brown flavoured water. Not only had the two products little obvious attraction, they were almost identical, yet these giants spent millions battling to establish their own tedious brand To us, they were clearly doomed. The 21st century was a time when size was all, when best- selling was thought to mean best..."Dr Hustler pauses again and picks up another 20th-century relic It was called a "stapler" Nobody today knows what it was used for. They knew that size led to cumbersome inefficiency - that's how the dinosaurs died out - but still insisted on creating bigger and bigger companies and bigger and bigger federal states, and seeing globalisation as the way forward.

A few voices were raised in protest, saying that it all contained the seeds of its own destruction, but they were ignored. They all heralded the arrival of the Internet, but forgot that it was just an information exchange process, not a physical enabler. A piece of "paper"."For a start," says Dr Hustler, business research Fellow of North Bournemouth Polytechnic, "people knew that the second millennium ended at the end of 2000, but they all celebrated a year early. Of course, we're going back a good few centuries, and it's hard to get inside the mind of a 20th-century person, but it seems that they were fatally capable of believing two opposite things at the same time." Dr Hustler pauses, and shuffles some of the 20th-century antiques on his desk A mobile phone A 2-D TV set. "We're going back to AD2010 or 2020," says Dr Ephraim Hustler, "a time which we know to have represented the zenith of the monster business corporations. Nowadays, of course, we know all about the Third Law of Business, which states that survival probability is in inverse ratio to growth rate, but they didn't know that then. All that has been found so far is a small electronic memo from head office to all branches, but businessologists have been able to extrapolate the real size of the megacorp from that, and they now reckon that it was the largest ever known.

Children and adults, we are all consumers now, caught up in a work-spend cycle we had better make the most of There is no way out of it.. SCIENTISTS HAVE discovered the remains of what may have been the largest business corporation of the early 21st century. Glasgow, city of the infamous Gorbals, is not what it used to be. Once the city of hard men and whiskey, it is now the city of European Culture, art galleries, harbour developments, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, bottled water and famously empathic children.But I wonder what it is like to be massaged by the school bully? A sharp pinch as he (or she) sidles up, to apply the "plain, unscented oil on the forearms" the children are to use? (A branded baby oil, I dare say, also on sale in the school shop.) It may be a very good idea indeed and I hope it works, and that it is not to do with a promotion by Saatchis.Parents, pupils and education authorities have to agree before the scheme commences.