Time Traveller

I have always been fascinated by the idea of time travel*. From Tom's Midnight Garden as a child to The Time Traveller's Wife this last year, I sigh over the possibilities and fret over the paradoxes.

Today, I came across an online book-in-progress Calling Project Hermes, about someone who gets sent through time in 2014, only to land back in 2005, only it's not 2005 as we know it, but a parallel version. I'll be watching the book unfold over the coming months.

I like to be prepared, so in the event of Bill and Ted turning up with the phone booth I keep a list of places/times/events in need of minor adjustment.

1. Lie in wait for the postman outside the house of My First Crush, to whom I sent a love letter after a school trip to France aged 11, and intercept it. Thus saving myself abject humiliation when he showed it to the entire class.

2. Leave a copy of Bluffer's Guide to Snogging by the bedside of my 12-year-old self so that I don't flee for the toilets when My First Boyfriend tries to kiss me during How Deep Is Your Love? at the end of the school disco, thus delaying our 'going out' by a full 9 months, before he plucked up the courage to try again, and I had some lessons on the back of my hand from a friend.

3. Fire bomb the hairdressing salon, where I had the first of a series of disastrous perms in my teens which ended up more like Kevin Keegan, than Kelly from Charlie's Angels.

4. Put away the beautiful vinyl Beatles singles with apples in the centre that represented the best music I have ever owned, or am likely to own, instead of playing them in stacks on the rickety portable record player with the dodgy needles and leaving them in the sun to bake.

5. Put a mattress at the bottom of the conker tree in our garden so that when I fall out aged 9, trying to prise unripe conkers from their shells, with a carving knife borrowed from the kitchen, I don't part-sever my thumb.

6. Confiscate the Gauloise I accept from a French Boy on the aforementioned trip and save myself 18 years of smoking. On second thoughts, after confiscating it, go forward and pop it in my handbag on my 18th birthday, otherwise the Zippo my boyfriend gives me will go to waste.

7. Hide the loft ladder, so that my 27-year-old self can't stash my beautiful pool cue out of sight to gather dust for the next 15 years.

8. Video the late Grandmother Duck making the world's best mushy peas, so that I can recreate the magic for the Little Ducks.

9. Lend myself money in 1983, so that I put more than a fiver on Corbieres in the National.

10. Keep this spot free for future inspiration. Any ideas welcome.


*With the one exception of the really rubbish effort by Christopher Reeve in Superman the movie, rewinding the world to save Lois after the earthquake. No, no, no, no, no.