Time Travel

 When you are small and imaginative you can spend a disproportionate amount of your life thinking about which superpower you would choose. 

At the age of 5, my choice would have been flying. I did a lot of flying in my dreams but it would have been a non-starter in reality because I was always a bit scared of everything and terribly travel sick. That thought was firmly put away during an assembly when I was about 9 or 10. It was delivered by our deputy headteacher, a man we called baggy-Adams. Mr Adams paced up and down the school hall in his corduroy trousers that sagged in the seat, as though they had been handed down to him by a much larger man. His favourite assembly was one where he could scare us stupid and talk about Greek Myths. So it was that Icarus ended my desire to fly.

For some, that would end dreams of superherodom but not me. I spent the next forty-something years of my life dreaming of and practising invisibility. I thought I was getting quite good at it but lately my powers have slipped. Children run up to me in school and say, “I saw you!” and accurately describe where I was (somewhere in the town I live) and what I was doing (walking while reading a book). That’s not meant to happen. I’m meant to sit behind the piano with no one realising it’s not just a very bad recording. I wasn’t meant to be noticed.

It all started to go wrong with Covid. The Long Suffering Husband is convinced that not only have I lost the ability to be noticed but that we are actively being watched. I’m sure I’ve written about the blue car before but every time we leave the house it drives slowly past. The LSH thinks we are in the Truman Show and will text ‘blue car’ if it goes past when I’m not there.

When they started giving Covid vaccines some of the less well hinged people on Twitter thought that it was a conspiracy theory and that you were actually going to be injected with nanobots that allowed you to time travel. I was excited about that idea, thinking it would be great to go back to 1882 and have a conversation I’ve been having in my head. If the invisibility was wearing off then my new superpower could be time travel.

I am happy to report that yesterday I genuinely became a time traveller. It was a wedding. A beautiful wedding for our friends’ son. I had been to school with his mum and she married the LSH’s best friend. Not all marriages are forever but once you are parents you are partners (of sorts) for life and our friends do this well. Unfortunately, I’m a terrible friend and after a while I saw a lot less of my old school pal. 

I walked in and it was like being transported back to a wedding party in 1989. The faces were the same. No, honestly. Exactly the same. It was quite emotional. People told me that they’d aged but I couldn’t see it and we were instantly recognised, so I’m claiming time travel. 

Now all I need to do is fast forward a couple of days to make this gift truly pay off and everything will be fine. 

If I can’t and the solid 3 hours sleep I managed last night wasn’t enough at least I’ll have one time travelling memory of a beautiful wedding.