Tag Archives: time travel

A Day to Remember

My first blogging task today was to answer comments and the second was to add a note to yesterday’s blog as I was tired when I wrote is and didn’t explain something properly.

Unlike life you can actually go back a day and improve it. If only you could do that in reality. It’s something I have often thought about, and have blogged about a few times. My main conclusions are that I wouldn’t want to be a teenager again (too painful) and I wouldn’t want to do anything that would risk me not meeting Julia. On a more practical note, I wouldn’t want to live in a time before antibiotics and anaesthetics either.

I’m having a blood test tomorrow, then a Covid booster (booked on the computer this morning) and am then taking Julia to the dentist They rang her today and told her they had a cancellation. This means her treatment will progress faster, but also means she will have to visit the dentist. It’s one of those things – everyone wants to avoid painful teeth but nobody wants to visit the dentist. I’m not exactly antsy with anticipation.

Bee Mural – Stoke

We had an interesting find in a collection of postal covers today – two of them were signed. The owner wandered through from the front of the shop and asked “Do you know who Millvina Dean was?”

The name sounded familiar, and I drilled deep into my accumulated memories of 30 years as an antique dealer before finding the answer. Millvina Dean was the youngest passenger to be rescued from the Titanic, at the age of two months. I’m not sure if the others were impressed by my depth of knowledge, but as a man who has trouble remembering what I did yesterday, I was impressed I could remember something like that. They aren’t hugely valuable because she lived to be over 90 and signed a lot of stuff as interest in the Titanic grew.

No, I can’t understand it either. It was a ship, it sank. It doesn’t require the same level of effort as climbing a mountain or discovering the source of the Nile. It’s strange what we hold on to from history.

If you want to read something interesting about Titanic survivors, try this link. I find it very interesting, and there’s a good chance you might too. I won’t tell you anything about it, as it might spoil the surprise.

Pictures are off the canal side murals we saw at Stoke last week.

Bee and other things – Stoke

Day 87

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What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again? The problem with that question is that I would have to repeat all my mistakes until it got to 1980, because I have to be in a coffee bar in Preston to meet Julia, and I don’t want to change that.

I would probably have to endure the next nine years too, as if we’d got married earlier it might not have lasted. I can’t be sure, but there’s no point in taking chances.

From 1989 I can start changing things, but by then it might be a little late to suddenly become hard-working, successful and professional.

That is the problem with these going back in time things – changing the good things along with the bad.

Sometimes, when I allow myself to daydream, I am wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and looking out of my office window into the quadrangle of an ancient university. On my desk are the proofs of my latest groundbreaking study of civil disorder in the 19th Century (Men in Skirts – the History of the Rebecca Riots or some such popular history).

However, would I be happy? Probably. Would I be prepared to swap my life now for the one of which I dream? Of course I would. I’m not stupid.

I am, however, a hopeless romantic and wouldn’t change a thing if it meant not being married to Julia. She has a very important place in my life, like the auriga in Ancient Rome, standing behind me and reminding me that I am mortal. Or, in our case, that I am an idiot and that I shouldn’t really use that sort of language to other drivers. It’s much the same, just updated.

Julia, South Pier, Lowestoft, Suffolk

Time, Travel and Temporal Trickery

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A few days ago I noted that the time on my computer was wrong. This seems to have corrected itself.

I reset the clock at work last week because it seemed to have slowed down during lockdown. We though the battery might be running down but it has now been keeping good time for over a week.

Then, last night, when I tried to set the alarm, using my phone as I do these days (look at me being all 21st Century), I realised that the time was wrong. All the world time was wrong. And the calendar was reading 17th June 2017. To be honest, I could do with going back in time three years and sorting a few bits out, so I wasn’t too upset.

It would be just far enough back in time to make a few improvements, but not far enough back to involve reliving the bad bits, like adolescence.

Obviously it was too good to be true, and as nothing else seemed to have changed, I checked the time on Julia’s phone, set a timer instead of the alarm, and went to sleep.

In the morning, with daylight and glasses, I reset the time and all seems back to normal.

Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.com

I have no idea why this happened, or why any of the previous incidents happened. May be clocks are joining in with the rest of the world in a widespread campaign to hate me.

It was my day off yesterday. Julia allowed me to drive her to the laundrette. It is the first time since lockdown. We have nice clean laundry and it smells good because it dried on the line. She has done some things by hand, so standards have been preserved, though I have mainly just aired, rotated and relied on my large stock of shirts and underwear which almost fit. There’s been a certain amount of breathing in as I got to the older stuff, but no disasters so far.

After lunch she allowed me to drive her to the gardens so she could check they were still OK. The grass is growing. We saw a greenfinch.

On the way back we saw two rows of traffic stop as they allowed a lady cyclist to retrieve her hat, which had been blown off. It was a comfort to see that manners still exist, though there was a bit of me that wondered why she didn’t have a string to hold it on.

Tomorrow I have a blood test, followed by dropping Julia off at work and then going to work myself. In the afternoon I will reverse the process (apart from the blood test).

If it wasn’t for the time travel I would lead a very dull life.

Photo by abdullah . on Pexels.com

Poppies, Planning and Pottering

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Yesterday it was coins, today it’s poppies. My life is varied if nothing else.

I spotted these bees in the poppies as I walked to the car yesterday. I did not have a lot of time to spare, and didn’t want the neighbours to think I was mad, so I just took a few shots as the poppies blew in the wind as I passed by on my way to work. As a result, the shots aren’t great, or varied.

Orange Poppies

That’s the story of my life. Rush, rush, rush and never time to stop and get a grip. After a three month holiday I really should be more organised. In fact I should be so organised that everything is perfect. It isn’t, and I will probably look back on this time with deep regret. Not that such thoughts are unusual, as I find I have them more and more. I thought you were supposed to be at your most depressed in your 40s, and that you became more cheerful as you age. It hasn’t worked out like that.

I suspect that like “Life begins at 40” and “60 is the new 40” this is aimed at making old people feel better about themselves. In fact one of the links I followed, whilst saying positive things about old age, also mentioned that hearing loss could be a burden in old age. It mentioned this several times and I wasn’t surprised to find a big button at the end of the article linking it to a site to sell hearing aids. I may be old, and slightly deaf, but I can still spot when someone is blowing smoke.

Last night I started planning for my retirement. It’s less than five years before I can draw my pension and I’m looking at all my options.

A time machine would be good, as I could go back, correct my worst decisions, save more money and look forward to a comfortable retirement, Ditto for winning the lottery. Logic says that I probably have more chance of inventing a time machine than I have of winning the lottery. I have made some plans for that. My theory is that if you buy enough longcase clocks and set them all running at the same time they will, because they are old and unreliable, all start to show marginally different times. When 12 o’clock comes round a few days later the cacophony of clocks striking at slightly different times will set up a temporal vortex and I will step through it. Now I come to think of it, I might have got that from an episode of Doctor Who…

I’ve just been looking at the WEA website (Worker’s Educational Association) looking for things to do in retirement. I hadn’t thought of them for years and now realise that some of their courses might have been useful during lockdown. Unfortunately the ones I want all have waiting lists. I’m sure I will manage to do something along those lines in the next few years.

Bee in Poppy

I had always imagined that retirement would be spent pottering around, but I’m already pottering, so I need another ambition. As I’m already becoming noticeably more curmudgeonly as time goes on I can’t save that for retirement either. It really does seem like I’m becoming old before my time. I should, according to the internet, be out learning how to skateboard, not sitting at home moaning. As I can’t even balance well enough to put my trousers on without introducing a frisson of jeopardy into the proceedings, so I’m certainly not risking a skateboard.

As a retirement project I may write a book about getting old. With any luck I may manage to sell it as a a TV script, so I will ensure that bathing in asses milk, driving sports cars and drinking red wine are prominent in the book so I can travel the world enjoying myself. According to this article I will need to drink 180 bottles of wine a day to get the full benefit. If I ever work out how to function without a liver I may give it a go.

The Fifty Foot Johnson

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I suppose I should start with an apology to my American readers for my poor taste, and an explanation to my British readers – johnson is American slang for penis. If you know my views on the Prime Minister and the way my minds works, I’m sure you can see what direction this post is moving in.

Last night I was musing on the chain of circumstances which, if applied to Stanley Johnson, might result in the non-birth of Bungling Boris. As you may have gathered from yesterday’s post, I am not a fan.

Mumps or measles would have done the trick, as would an unfortunate rugby injury. It’s less likely that I could have invented a time travelling burdizzo, despite the obvious attraction of such a direct and effective method. Then I thought of radiation. Would it be possible to travel back in time with a microwave and secure the required result. I’m not quite clear on the use of radiation, which seems to have variable effects. Doctor Bruce Banner seems to have swollen up and turned green as a result of exposure to radiation while Peter Parker assumed many of the characteristics of a spider.

I may have to drop the idea of irradiation, due to the side effects.

Anyway, if one of the Johnsons was to become a Marvel Superhero it would have to be Boris’s younger brother Jo Johnson. Marvel superheroes have alliterative names so there is no other choice. And why, you ask, do they have alliterative names? Because Stan Lee had a bad memory and it helped him remember them. Sounds slightly unlikely, but that’s what it says on Wikipedia.

Due to this I am going to abandon the idea of irradiating Stanley, as it might turn him into a giant, and nobody would want a fifty foot Johnson. Let’s face it, nobody actually wants a six foot Johnson.

A Walk, a Weasel, but no Wren

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If I ever write a novel about Time Travel, and I’m not saying one way or the other, I’m going to need a way of making my protagonist travel in time. One way I’m considering is making him write a blog which gets behind, a bit like I often do, so that he trips over his metaphysical feet in trying to catch up.

It’s taken me three days to write about Monday, and nothing much happened on Monday. If it had been a day filled with incident I’d still be writing. As it is, I’m just about to start writing about Tuesday.

I loaded up the camera, put a handful of bird food in my pocket and set off round the lake at Rufford Abbey.

Rufford Abbey – footpath by the Lake

Mill on Rufford Lake

Silver Birch – Rufford Abbey

It was an interesting day and after taking nearly 300 shots I’ve already deleted over 100. The problem is that birds just don’t cooperate. They move too fast, they hide in shadows and they lurk behind twigs (which prevent the autofocus working).

At one time I did consider a post based on near misses – the blurred Goldcrest, the fence rail recently vacated by the Dunnock and the twig where the Wren had just been perching. Fortunately I had second thoughts, or this could have been one of my less popular posts.

Mute Swan – Rufford Abbey

Black-headed Gulls at Rufford

Squirrel at Rufford

Greylag geese under archway at Rufford

The best bit of the day was when I was photographing at the woodland bird tables, and fighting off squirrels. Suddenly there was a flurry in the leaves and the squirrels scattered, closely pursued by a weasel. I was too slow to get anywhere near it with the camera, but it was very funny, and what they deserved after stealing most of the food I put out.