Blog to the Future.

I watched Back to the Future earlier on today. What a great film! It's near enough impossible to imagine that type of film being made nearly as well today. It also spawned those rarest of things, great sequels. I wonder what I'd do if I could travel back in time myself. I'd probably go back to myself at 10 and tell 'me' to learn the guitar, really well...and the piano. And to work harder at school, but I doubt I'd really listen to that. I'd kneecap Hitler, go watch The Beatles in Hamburg, audition for Shakespeare (a small part), chat with Socrates (and before you say anything I don't speak ancient Greek-like I don't have a time machine) and get a straight answer out of Nostradamus. Actually, how much fun to go back to being myself at middle school, with my mind as it is now, and completely mess with my teachers' heads. I could ask Mr Redgrave why he still teaches Newtonian physics when it's been totally undermined by General Relativity, or offer an existentialist critique of 'Goodnight Mr Tom'. At the very worst, I could take a Kalashnikov and an armoured-car back to ancient Rome and become Emporer.

As fun as much of this would be, the inevitable effects would be to change history, and thus the present. Now, my life is far from perfect-very far in fact. But I'd not want to swap it for anything else (I'm not sure I even convince myself of that one). I certainly don't want anything I've done to be wiped from the universe, or from my memory. I could easily have decided to take a course at university with career prospects (as interesting as Anthropology was it hasn't proved useful), but then I'd be in that career now. I hated my last job as much as anything, but I made some great friends who are important to me, and I wouldn't want to lose that. Had I taken a different course, or worked harder at school and gone to Oxford, then I wouldn't have gone to Roehampton, and all my experiences and friends there would be lost to me. I suppose I should be more grateful for what I've got really. Many of us bemoan our situation in life all too easily, me included. But when push comes to shove, how much of it would we really want to trade in?