As you are probably aware we are all travelling in time. Unfortunately at one minute per minute and only in the forwards direction, but nonetheless whilst I first came to this world in 1967, I now magically find myself in futuristic 2007, some forty years down the line. As I squeezed out into the world all covered in blood and trying hard not to think about the portal through which I had entered this strange world, I could not have imagined what changes I would see. Mainly because I was a baby and incapable of understanding anything at all. But even when I had travelled ten years into the future and found myself amongst the punk-faced people of 1977 and had acquired more knowledge of the planet that I would call home, I could not have foreseen what changes would occur in the next thirty years.
To be honest not that much happened for the next twenty years and the world was pretty much identical, but in my last ten years of time travel I have seen some amazing changes. As I walked along Shepherd's Bush Grey tonight on my way out, seemingly everyone I saw had a mobile phone pressed to their ear. Ten (well certainly fifteen) years ago this would have been a queer sight and had the last decade passed by in a minute I would have had some trouble making sense of what I was seeing.
This thought made me wonder how different the world will look in 2017. What advances will have been made? What new ways will people have found to communicate? What other inventions that we can't even imagine will have been invented? Like a robotic dog that eats carbon emissions - except unimaginable, unlike the robotic carbon dog, which I have just imagined very easily.
Although it would be fun to leap forward in time straight away to see what is going on, or to go back and meet Jesus and tell him to be a bit clearer on exactly what he wants from us all, I do quite like this gentle paced time travel, giving us all the time to acclimatise to the crazy stuff that keeps on changing and improving and getting worse. Though really it's only phone technology that has altered as far as I can remember.
I went out and drank some wine. It seemed to project me into the future slightly faster than normal. This might be the way to go if you are impatient to see what will happen next and don't like the show pace of regular time travel.
