We're going deep, way deep - 33 days / 5470 days

Everyone thinks about time travel, and I’m sure that the idea of going back to the time of a major fuck up and setting things right is quite an attractive prospect. However, if time travel was possible, we may have already done it.

If someone unlocks the secrets to time travel in my lifetime (which could be infinite if my plan to eat as many preservative laden foods as possible pans out), then my life at this very minute could be the product of some time-travelling jiggery-pokery. It may well be that those moments I regret were actually contrived by my future self to steer me away from a future (albeit not life-threatening) catastrophe.

I think this is possible, and also that I'm already involved in time travel in some way, possibly even as the inventor of a device which enables its user to travel through time. We’ll call this a “machine of time”. You may think this to be a ludicrous claim, but my reasoning is that my regrets in life so far have only consisted of a series of minor setbacks, which provides me with enough motivation via the “what if” factor to build a machine which would enable me to correct them; but there have been no major incidents which if reversed would negate the need for inventing the contraption in the first place.

See, if for example I accidentally beheaded my gym teacher with a basketball when I was 16, I’d consider that a major event, which would most probably consume me with guilt and some degree of gross-out, scarring me for life. If I went back in time and changed the course of that basketball, my past self would no longer feel the need to invent the machine and would therefore cease to be, or he would remain in the past, along with my past self? Who knows?

It’s academic anyway, because what really happened was that I threw the ball at his head with barely any force and it just bounced off. The term “It could have been worse” couldn't be more fitting here, because it was worse, but my future self fixed it enough to save me jail and nightmares but leave some level of regret there. My teacher died 5 years later from a heart attack, so there’s no guarantee that it was my fault, but there’s an element of doubt to keep me going.

This theory may have some sceptics scratching their heads, but this is more likely something to do with lice, because I am living proof that it worked. My arm is a rocket, the teacher should have died there and then. There's also no way that someone as clumsy as me could have negotiated the last 30 years without the intervention of a higher power.

Yes, this has absolutely nothing to do with my 39-day countdown. No, actually, it has everything to do with it.

I had a meeting with my boss today, and we ended up chatting about various non-work stuff, and we got onto the subject of multiverses. He's not a physicist and neither am I, so there's no logical reason for him to mention this other than prompting me to invent a time machine. Going back further, it's a hella coincidence that I'm even working there in the first place. I was made redundant from a college who were set to benefit from over a million quid of money I'd secured. No one in their right mind gets rid of me and a million pound outside the realms of the twilight zone.

But then you have to go back even further, because my excellent former colleague left that employer about 2 years before I did, and I got her job. She took up a post at....my current employer....but just happened to leave that job a few weeks before I was paid off from mine.....paving the way for me to fit in seamlessly to her post....like I had been there before!

So I was always supposed to be here today. I'm the anti-Dante. There has always been a reason behind my year-long separation from my family other than pure bad luck.

Deep breath.

The pint that changed the world

If I had moved to the USA before now, I would never have built a time machine, and my PE teacher would have died in 1995. It was this PE teacher who got me interested in cricket, joining Boroughmuir C.C, where I met the person partly responsible for my choosing the degree I hated at university, prompting my earlier than anticipated move into employment, where I met a great group of guys and girls who shared my love for the absinthe and tequilla, leading to some classic drunken nights, some of which were recorded in photo form, and then displayed on my website (which I had learned to create from another cricket team mate), a website my future wife stumbled upon, found funny, and promptly snapped me up.

Words can't describe how I have felt since this revelation hit me on the train journey home. I can live my life knowing that everything happens for a reason, and when something bad happens I'll always know that it could be worse, because it was worse and I fixed it. A higher power is at work, and it's me.

It was all my fault. But I have no regrets.

Because it could have been worse.