Time and Tide

You know how you never seem to have a camera with you when you see a photo that would be perfect to capture?

Well, I’ve been thinking about time travel a lot recently, probably more than is healthy for me.

I used to always say that if I could travel in time I would systematically choose the past, most specifically 1920 or thereabouts in America.

I reasoned that the future was something that I was certain to see anyway so backward in time was the only place to go. So convinced of the wisdom of my choice have I been that I always feared that one day I would suddenly find that my confidence in getting to the future had evaporated and that I had, overnight, become old; therefore wanting only to travel forward.

It seems that I am getting older, the mirror hardly lies, but I still want to travel backward in time. However, I have noticed that the parameters of that journey are changing.

Firstly I started wanting to visit specific family members that I have never met; my Great Grandma Minnie would be near the top of that list.

Then something very strange started happening and my idea of visiting the roaring twenties began to fade.

If anyone asked me today I would answer Britain 1955.

So I have a new theory which goes like this; time travel has always been within our ability to develop, although a certain degree of scientific research, ability and experience has to be achieved first. In each single person likely to develop a time travel concept this takes time and each time that someone has been close to completing a prototype they have realised that the point they would choose to travel to would be the point of their own birth, and therefore ultimately unnecessary as they would live the same life anyway. So they abandon the project until someone else takes it up and so on and so on.

Follow?

Still I wish I had had my camera ready yesterday as I turned my head leaving home for work and saw the magnificent glory of the crab apple tree next to the house in full bloom and then my wife in full stage costume walking underneath it.

White and pink blossom that thickly fills the early morning and late evening air with sweet perfume and attracts the bees from several valleys hence, plus Wilma.