Moments of Time-Travel

Back in 2010, I wrote a blog post, Thinking about Time-Travel, prompted by a question raised on Twitter – ‘What advice would you give to your sixteen year-old Self?’ The advice I wrote then was: “Don’t bother with uni. And take English Lit & History, not Maths and physics for A-Level“. I now see that some even more useful advice would have been to quit boarding school and go to sixth form college. That degenerate and isolated environment was no good for me. At the end of the post, published when I was thirty-four, I wrote: “Of course, it would be more useful if my fifty year old self could tweet me and give me a heads-up”. And now I’m fifty years old. The gap between those two times seems both short and long. That’s the nature of time travel. Thirty-four-year-old me needed a lot of advice. I was unhappy a lot of the time, working a succession of jobs that I hated. I also didn’t appreciate how much fun I was having. But I did the best that I could. The pandemic changed everything,…