It was the day of the Christmas get together of me and my friends from University. It's been going on for maybe nineteen years now, though none of us quite remember how it began or how we ended up becoming this core group of nine middle aged men. It's a good tradition to uphold, though it seems to be coming round with frightening rapidity now. It doesn't seem like a year since the last one. Oh dear, we're getting old - as was shown by the fact that the first 30 minutes of the evening were spent discussing various maladies we've been suffering from and anoter hour or so was about which of us would die first (something we always talk about, but which seems to get progressively less funny the closer we get to that being likely).
But my favourite part of the evening was a discussion we had about something that we had talked about nearly twenty years ago in the house that four of us had lived in when we first moved to London. Tim, Stew, Mackay and me had lived in Acton for a year or so, having moved in in 1989. We were poor and young and had to make our own amusement. The science fiction loving Mackay had wondered if time travel would ever become possible in his lifetime and stated that if it did he would travel back in time and come to our Acton house on a appointed day at an appointed time and tell his younger self all about it. He put the time and date of his choosing in his diary and vowed to transfer it onwards to his next year's diary and so on.
The day came and went, but futuristic Mackay did not come to the door. Surely that proved that time travel would not be possible, or at least that there was some impediment to future Mackay's return, whether financial, legal or ethical.
Undeterred by the failure, Mackay kept making a note of the date every time he got a new diary, because of course if he ever forgot to do so then that would explain why the future him did not know when he was supposed to show. But at some point a decade or so he forgot to record the date in a new diary and the information was lost. So maybe, after all time travel will be possible, but future Mackay no longer had the required information. Maybe he took a stab in the dark and came back to Hereford Rd at some point between 1989 and 1991 but we were all out (seems unlikely as there was usually someone in) or maybe we didn't recognise him because we weren't expecting him. Time travel was still a possibility.
Tonight I decided that we should recreate the experiment and suggested that if time travel becomes possible then one of us at the table should come back and visit us on this very night at the very restaurant at 9.50pm. I said that I could easily now make a note of the date and time in my blog, so it would always be there to be found, as long as the internet was still working. If not one of us, then maybe some future reader of this diary might make the trip back to tell us that it is as easy for them to travel through time as it is for us to travel through space. 9.50pm was chosen because that was some ten minutes on from when we were having the conversation and that would give us an air of suspense. I also said that if for some reason it was impossible for future Mackay - or whoever - to enter the restaurant (due to the laws of physics or Timecop style worries over legality or the danger of the same genetic matter from two time streams coming together), then they should just push their face up against the window for us to see. We had thought of everything and now the details have been recorded here then this could hopefully turn into an empirical test. Please remember them yourself in case you ever get the chance to travel in time and pass them on to your children and grandchildren so that they might be prepared should the time arrive - and if not ask them to pass on the information to future generations. I should mention for any future time travellers that the restaurant is
The Gay Hussar on what we 21st Century Londoners called Greek St (doubtless a radioactive pile of rubble in your time). For present day readers I might add that the Gay Hussar (largely chosen for the name - we dined at the Gaylord Indian restaurant a few years ago - we are nearly all in our forties) is a really great place and definitely the finest Hungarian restaurant I have ever been in.
The appointed moment arrived and I am sad to say that no futuristic Mackay or anyone else came to the door. So given this clear documentation here and the fact that thousands of you will doubtless follow my instructions we have to assume that time travel in impossible, or can not be so specific or is too expensive for such a prank. Unless of course you've all read about the failure and thought there's no point in passing the info onwards now, which means that your own laziness and defeatism has caused the failure.
About four minutes after the appointed time, a man very much resembling one of our nine, Mr Mallett, shambled through the door. Was this the future him? After all the real Mallett was sitting at our table. Was he being fashionably late (something that time travellers really have little excuse for)? But it turned out that Mallett had just popped out, unnoticed to have a cigarette.
Minutes later Mackay had disappeared. Perhaps somehow his future self has whisked him forwards or he had found a portal back to early 90s Hereford Rd. But no, he'd just gone to the toilet.
Mackay does believe he has met his future self though. He claims that when he was visiting the Dr Who exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in the early 90s, he saw himself on a CCTV camera showing images of the next room. It was him from behind and he seemed a little balder and more stooped, but he moved like him and looked identical otherwise. Mackay encountered himself at the Dr Who display and he claims was astonished to see this man who looked like him only older. The man turned to Mackay and asked him a question about Dr Who. The present day Mackay can no longer remember what that question was, but at the time the young Mackay knew the answer and gave it immediately. Had the future Mackay travelled back in time to find out a piece of Dr Who trivia that he once knew, but had now forgotten. Mackay believes that when he can remember what the question was then he will know it is time to travel back in time to ask it.
To me that seems like a bit of a waste of time travelling abilities. Better to go back and warn yourself not to do something stupid or to give yourself the lottery numbers for the next decade. And just look up the Dr Who thing in a book. Stewart suggested that maybe Dr Who fans share a certain physiognomy. But Mackay is adamant.
Yet if he could travel in time why did he not come to the Gay Hussar tonight?
Only time will tell and give us these answers. In a way I suppose I am projecting my thoughts into the future by writing this. One day futuristic people of the 2010s might read these words. Maybe even the 2020s. The entries of 2002 and 2003 are going to soon be read in book form and it's strange enough to have this voyage six years back into the past. It is indeed a foreign country. But I can only observe and not change anything. So perhaps that's what happened tonight. Perhaps the ghosts of our future selves were there in the restaurant invisibly toasting us.
And in a way if we keep up this tradition then somewhere in the future the nine of us (perhaps with the eldest sons of the deceased taking their place) are toasting another Christmas, as we travel into the future on this time machine that goes forward at one second for every actual second.
I hope we're still doing it in another twenty years time and still hoping that our future selves might somehow manage to come through the door, whilst looking at each other's sagging faces and truly wishing that our younger selves were here in more than memory.
Happy Christmas to the Gay Hussars (which is what I have belatedly decided to call this random grouping). Thanks for another fun and tragic night.
