Calculating Credits & Debits for Time Travellers
If you read about my trip to Cardiff by train on Monday 10th January (when it seems that I was debited 37 minutes of time by persons unknown in response to my jaunt 19 hours into the future on Sunday 2nd January), then you will probably have railed at the unfairness of the system. Why should my daughter Lauren, my companion on the trip to Cardiff, have been debited by 37 minutes when she hadn’t even been time travelling; she’s too busy with her degree course at Central St Martins?
Fortunately Lauren contacted me later in the week to explain that things had been put right. She had almost finished writing her final year dissertation about set design in the theatre when she was seized by an urge to restructure it (something to do with Poetic Realism).
She walked from her office in Fulham to the front door of her flat – a journey that took less than half a minute as her office and her flat are both in the same house – and when she arrived at her destination, she realised that, on reflection, there was no need to restructure her dissertation. This, she estimated, saved approximately one hour of her time. I know what you’re thinking! I think so too: it has to be some kind of recompense for what happened to us in Cardiff – there’s no other logical explanation.
I feel newly optimistic about time travel and may attempt another journey next week. The only thing that’s troubling me is that Araminta hasn’t come home. She went off on another of her pioneering trips – each time, I can’t help noticing, she takes more trouble with her appearance and she stays away for longer – and last night she didn’t come home at all. Either she has ‘got off with’ someone in the future (if you’re in America, I think you call it ‘dating’) or something terrible has happened to her.
I have had the police here this morning, just in case she has been abducted. I showed them the black tights left behind when I time-travelled myself last Sunday but as I had laundered them in a ‘dark colours’ wash on Thursday, apparently they’re not much use as evidence.
I showed them Araminta’s autobiography. She’d claimed to have written 60,000 words of it but when I looked at the manuscript, it was more like 600. Either she suffers from some kind of numerical dyslexia or she was trying to wind me up because I write so slowly myself (she has an eccentric sense of humour), or someone has visited from the future to destroy the evidence.
Either way, the police are reluctant to get involved and so I will have to conduct these enquiries myself, with the help of two assistants:
1) my daughter Lauren. She is working on a theory to help us understand the complex formula by which the credit/debit system is calculated and administered. She says she believes time travellers only have to pay back a proportion of time gained on expeditions.
2) my goddaughter EM. She is nearly six years old and she regularly travels back in time to a period she describes as ‘when I was an orphan’. Small children are prone to fanciful imaginings and I wouldn’t have given her stories much credence if she hadn’t recently become terribly upset about Freddie Mercury dying – an event that took place more than thirteen years before she was even born. It follows that ‘when I was an orphan’ is her way of expressing her experience of visiting a time before her mother gave birth to her.
If Araminta doesn’t come back by tonight I will schedule some after-school sessions with my goddaughter next week to ‘share best practice’ about time travel. And if her parents will allow it, I may sound her out about accompanying me as I attempt to go forward in time to find Araminta. EM’s little silver scooter should prove invaluable as a getaway vehicle, so long as we can fit our two feet on the plate, and we can find a way to transport it with us.
Article source: http://www.zimbio.com/Writers+Blogs+on+Writing/articles/jxUxMmA-kAW/Calculating+Credits+Debits+Time+Travellers
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