Time enough for love

As promised to Miss Hap, another little visual cue to 'Hello Kitty.'
I sometimes wonder how it must feel being locked into routines. Sometimes I think it must be a lot easier because you can plan ahead all the things you have to do or need to do but I think all in all I prefer my ever changing schedules. Sometimes my week is full and I hardly have a moment for myself and then sometimes I have so much free time that I can get all of my personal tasks done and still have time to play. More of time later!
After a lot of telephone calls to various agencies we managed to get tickets for the upcoming film festival next month and I just know we'll be desperately rearranging our schedules so we can attend the movies that look the most appealing to us.
Miss Hap has finished this week with her involvement in her chorus line and starts next week in a new play and I really hope she finds the sea in that small tinplate town. I think there has to come a point where she chooses the promotions over the stage simply for reasons of income and opportunity. I can't fault her dreams though.
I've been busy organizing a stand at the arts and fashion show which has kept me away from the office and has had me meeting many old and new colleagues. How refreshing that has been.

When I've had the time I've also been watching a British TV show on the internet called "Doctor Who" or as he's called here, Dokutaa Fuu. We have it here on a late time slot on Mondays but we're a little behind the rest of the world and I can't always guarantee that I'll be home to watch it. The Doctor is an alien being who looks human (he has two hearts) and comes from a long dead race who were masters of time travel. It's difficult for him to die because he has the ability to regenerate a whole new body (this is great when actors tire of playing the role and move on) and he usually saves the Earth and the universe from many evil characters and races. The show doesn't really have a big fan base here but I love it.

I think the concept of time travel is a fascinating one and I probably first came across it with stories like "Urashima and the Kingdom Beneath the Sea", about a fisherman who is away for three days and comes back to his town to find three hundred years have passed. H.G Wells's Time machine was another story I remember about a man who builds a machine to project him self into the future and witnesses the division of mankind into an innocent child like race on the surface and the cannibalistic dark humans who live underground. Interestingly enough I came across the time ships, the official sequel to that novel and was very impressed with the penmanship of Steven Baxter. On a personal note, my favorite time travel novel is "There will be time" by Poul Anderson. This deals with people with a special gene and gives them the ability to will themselves back and forwards in time. It saves a lot of effort on the science side and concentrates on the story. It tells of his life, how he meets a group of travelers like himself who steal and kill in the past to gain riches to prevent a Utopian future. He decides for the greater good of the future of mankind that he must stop them from making a tyrannical future.

There are also movies like the terminator that has a robot coming back from the future to kill its mortal enemy before he was born and again as a helpless child. Back to the future is another trilogy of movies that deals with time travel as Marty, the hero of the movies, travels back to see his parents meet, almost not meet (and he starts to fade away as a consequence) and indirectly inspires the song, Johnny B Good. Then because he brings back a sports result paper from the future, his protagonist gets super rich and creates a whole new future. It can only get worse or can he save the day and make it all right, as it should be?
So what would you do if you had a time machine?
I can think of many temptations of things I'd like to go back and see and perhaps alter.
Answers on a post card or in my comment box please...
Also tell me what, if any, time travel stories or movies you like.
But before you tell me what you might do in a time machine, read on!

Look at yourself today.
Everything you are and every thing and everyone you know is because of the choices you or others have made during every minute of your life. Your life can be measured in days and each day is like a report card stacked on top of each other. If you were able to go back to a day in your history and change something then the rest of your life from that point forward would perhaps be very different from how you now remember it.
This effectively means that the day report cards stacked on top won't be the same as they are right now.
Imagine the last time you left your home. You have a choice, turn left or turn right. Perhaps you usually turn right every day but if you had turned left something really wonderful or something terrible may have happened. Think back in your life time to how perhaps a set of seemingly co-incidences came together and something happened that you will never forget. 
If you took your time machine and tried to change a bad thing that happened to you ten years ago then its very possible and highly likely that something great that happened to you five years ago may never have happened. Of course a different good thing may have occurred. You may want to change one small thing but it becomes like a snowball rolling down a hill and the change gets bigger and bigger whether directly or indirectly with each passing day as you come back towards your present day. Small changes grow to become large ones.
Then of course come the paradoxes, the most famous one being the grandfather paradox. You go back in time and cause some event that prevents your biological grandfather from meeting your biological grandmother, hence one of your parents is never born and consequently neither are you! This of course means that since you were never born you couldn't go backwards in time to prevent them meeting and so you will be born! (ad infinitum!)


I think that I would be quite scared to go back in case I did accidentally alter something that stopped something good from happening. In retrospect, I can live with the bad things that have happened to me and I have probably learned life lessons from them and so changing them takes away something from me, lessons, experiences and understanding.

If there was one change in my life then who knows, it may well affect yours too.
I may have written something completely different in my blog because of it and even the things that you read here and anywhere else could have small almost unnoticeable effects in your lives but it would be something different from how you know it now.