Time Travel

High concept – high risk of bollox – imagine a tunnel, shut your eyes imagine a tunnel, perhaps imagine you are on a train going through a dark tunnel, now imagine it’s a time tunnel, imagine you are going through time and you are travelling at 10 years an hour, so over each hour you fly through a decade. As you travel you have in front of you a piece of gauze which filters things flying through the air but allows you to pass through time at this speed. Now imagine on tiny pieces of glass or paper or card, fashions, moods, facts, ideas, people, songs, anything that you care to think of that was happening at this time fly past your ears, now imagine that your gauze filter can catch the best bits whilst flying through to the future place. It would be the equivalent of keeping the baby while throwing out the bathwater. So imagine if we can have all the technology and yet still have gentlemen tip their hats and offer us girls seats, or we can have all the freedom of being treated as equal with all the privilege of being treated as the fairer sex, if we can have the level of social flexibility and lack of class divide with all the wisdom that generations of landowning and money and heritage can afford, in fact what if we can just cherry pick the best from the culture whenever it happened, bag it and take it with us into the time tunnel, if we can show our children what we love and why we love it, show that every generation throws the baby out with the bathwater – but with our collective understanding of what makes society great and what makes it hopeless and our fabulous open global village we don’t need to do that anymore. We can only travel one way in the time tunnel as we currently experience it, but is our need for nostalgia really only a desire to pull through the best bits and share them with the people we are going to be handing the baton onto?