A question asked at Quora this week, with an answer from the inimitable
Ian Lang, "Forced to do relativity at school, college and polytechnic.Still don't know much."
[Used with Mr Lang's kind (blanket) permission.]
I have got a time machine. I started building it negative three years ago, in 2021, and sent it back to myself last year. In theory it doesn’t exist yet but since my wife is always grumbling about not being able to get the Hyundai Getz in the garage for it (and has will have been for the next two years, whereafter she will has been grumbling about not getting in the Rolls-Royce which will has had been bought on the proceedings of temporally questionable legal procedures) it does, in practicality, exist even though it hasn’t been invented yet.
The crew consists of me, Fat Dave, and a blonde woman in her early twenties called Paula, who runs around wearing figure-fitting outfits that don’t quite border on indecent but are just enough to catch the interest of a male demographic 16–30 because as you know, any self respecting time traveller has to have one of those on board, and sometimes she does something good.
The Co-Op are getting very suspicious about why, once every couple of weeks, we go in with an handful of lottery tickets with small value prizes on them and get about £300 back a time. So are WH Smiths, GT News and the convenience shop down the road in which we somehow always get three numbers over ten tickets.
Ladbrokes thinks it blacklisted us last September after we scooped a massive whack on a seemingly impossible round-robin at 30,000 to 1, but that’s not a bother because there’s always the year before that and of course, William Hill and Paddy Power are still taking our bets on, although PP will have has kicked us out too by the time (from this reference at least) that one on the end result of Brexit comes to fruition. No spoilers, but you won’t believe the way that turns out. I’ll just say if you’re from Iceland or Madagascar, it’s going to be great, if you’re French or live in the northern bits of Athens then, yeah, sorry.
So anyway. Last year we went back and got a load of stones together and dumped them in a circle in Wiltshire about four thousand years ago, just to have a laugh at the archaeologists today, and about two thousand years ago we told a bloke called Julius that everything in an island just over the water from Gaul was made of rubies and that nobody defends it.
Dave and Paula don’t speak German but I do, and I realise now that acting as interpreter for a conversation they had with a certain Herr Marx wasn’t my cleverest act. We enjoyed ourselves in Switzerland at the turn of the twentieth century though, even though Paula left her dissertation for her physics degree behind in the tea-rooms of a hotel next to the patent office. We went back to look for it but it had vanished, so she had to print it out again. Could have been a lot nastier, glad we didn’t radically alter any time-lines on that like we did when Fat Dave left his i-Pad behind in California in 2004.
We’re sorry about 1929 and that stock market crash thing. Rest assured we sacked our accountant over that, if it’s any consolation.
The best jape was the Brink’s Mat robbery. We didn’t actually do it, we just nicked most of the three tonnes of gold afterwards. Nobody knows where it is, because it’s currently in a barn near Inverness. In 2063.
Oh yes, I suppose I ought to mention April 23–26th 2087. Just get a lot of spam and boiled water and some electric torches, and stay indoors with the windows boarded up and the doors bolted. Get some batteries and an FM radio too. You’ll be alright if you don’t emerge again until about 10:00 GMT on the 27th.
If you see what looks like a Vauxhall Viva appearing out of thin air, and a fat bloke, and another with a scruffy beard, and a woman wearing a mini-skirt get out of it and probably go straight to the bookies, come and have a word. There might be a big drink in it for you.
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