STRANGE DAYS INDEED

It’s been a bit of an odd few days. Courtrooms in Italy are trying to be convinced that nice young American girls can’t possibly be killers, whilst other girls are trying to claim that they were nearly killed by addiction to their own fitness regimens at their local gyms. Well, about the first, I’m not really qualified to comment, but it remains a tragedy for all concerned, and another triumph in salaciousness for the international press, whilst the second really doesn’t surprise me at all, although I’m not really sure it qualifies as what I would really regard as news. I mean, I know that if I went on a “pie only” diet for a couple of years it would probably make me quite ill, but I don’t really imagine that it would be a matter of concern for anyone but my doctor, my immediate family and myself.

Still, I wonder perhaps she was just using that current obsession for trying to be more significant than any of us really are, or, at the very least, and probably the best any of us can really hope for, trying to be slightly more significant than the rest of the herd, and she was superficially what you might call “pretty” so maybe this was her chance, her shot, her moment in the spotlight, so I shouldn’t really begrudge it her. After all, as I was once advised, it’s not that you can possibly make your car unable to be stolen, you just have to make it look less easy to steal than the next one along. It’s the same with all our “unique selling points” which are seldom all that unique when it boils down to it, after all most human beings can do most jobs with a bit of training and concentration, so you have to basically just be better than the other guys on the day.

Meanwhile, there are 26 chunks of a wayward satellite that are likely to survive their fall through the atmosphere on a day when there is a record jackpot building up for yet another lottery win. I wonder whether someone will finally prove that old adage that you’re more likely to be hit by a piece of something falling from outer space than to actually win the lottery…? Now, that would be a “unique selling point” to tempt those newshounds, if you lived to tell it.

At the same time it seems, for the moment at least, that you can actually change the laws of physics, and the impossibility of faster-than-light travel seemed to have been breached. “We’ve broken the light barrier now” was, I do believe, a line from the very first pilot of “Star Trek” way back in the days before I could even walk by myself, so now those folk who choose to wear pointy rubber ears at the weekend can at last raise themselves a quizzical eyebrow and say “Fascinating! Roddenberry was right…”

Other heads containing other minds are now conjecturing as to whether this now means that time travel is possible, and seems to have got the geekier end of the “I reckon” brigade into a bit of an old tizzy, although I suspect that, despite all the tales of going back and visiting the dinosaurs, this bright new discovery is only really of any use in that area if you wish to arrive somewhere one six billionth of a second earlier, which is hardly likely to help you get to the front of the queue at passport control.

Still, early days, (or are they???) and all that… Mighty oaks have grown from the tiniest of acorns. Who would have guessed that someone managing to switch a liquid crystal from dark to light a few decades ago would lead to the revolutions in engineering - and digital watches - that we see today. Mind you, I’m from a generation who still regard digital watches as being a pretty neat idea, so what do I know? However, who could have imagined that forty years ago our washing machines would contain as much computing power as all those huge rooms that calculated the vectors that helped Neil Armstrong to park his tinfoil craft on the edge of the sea of tranquility? Perhaps we stand on the brink of exciting new possibilities in time travel that will give us inventions that none of us can yet imagine, although I’m willing to bet that eventually it transforms into something a bit dull and work-related that can be knocked off for a fraction of the price and eventually ends up on offer at your local supermarket.

Uh-oh, me from the future has just dropped in to have a quick word and it seems I was right. He’d finally given in to the public pressure to buy himself an “iTime” device and was just trying it out after finally spotting one he could afford on “iAmazon v10.8.5” and had overshot by a couple of decades because the 6 and the 8 looked too alike on the tiny screen. He’s now just popped back to tamper with the timelines a little to see if he can get it even cheaper, so God knows which of the infinite number of universes I’ll end up living in.

After all, when it comes to matters of time, I can barely get the hang of one linear universe traveling along at one constant speed. I switched on the TV on a Saturday morning after, I suppose unsurprisingly oversleeping following a week of daytimes staggering around like a zombie and late evenings spent alone and waiting to meet late night trains. There was a rugby game playing. The scoreline seemed to be 46 – 3 to England at the time, and yet it was less than ten seconds before the commentator said, “There’s lots of questions for the England management…” which they kept saying through all the other games that were on and that, as far as I can remember (I was reading at the time) they also won. Now, I’ll admit that I don’t really understand how rugby works and tend to ask stupid questions of those in my life who follow it, but, when it seems to me that things are going reasonably well for a side, why are our so-called “experts” always so dismissive of it?

Maybe I’ll figure it all out in time, if I’m given the time, and if “future me” doesn’t keep on popping up at the most inconvenient moments. It’s hard to tell yourself to “read the bloody manual” when you know that’s precisely what you wouldn’t do yourself and obviously didn’t. He asked me to see if I could make any sense of it, and so I took the device off him to have a look, had a moment of understanding that’s on the tip of my mind… No, it’s gone… which meant that that whole future just blinked out of existence and never ended up happening.

The last thing “future me” said as he disappeared was “Oh, thanks a bleeding lot…” which does at least prove to me that my language and general sense of bonhomie never really improves all that much.

God! I was getting sick of him just turning up already… but now I miss his little visits…

So, sorry, and all that, for inadvertently wiping out time travel for everybody, although, if these devices are quite as common as he said they were, I imagine that this kind of thing is going on all the time.