Friday, August 11, 2006
Time Machine
Had a brilliant night out at the Butler’s Wharf Chophouse with a mate and our other halves in celebration of his oh-no four-oh. The champagne, wine, port and all flowed freely, and, along with some top tucker really set the mood for a good old reminisce to our school days, parties you know. A particular comment though got us back on to a favourite topic of discussion we have after too many beers and when our missus’ are discussing shoes and bags like they will solve all of the world’s problems…….
Anyway, as we’re chowing away a couple and their daughter come and sit at the next table to us. And I’m struck by how the daughter, all stick thin arms and legs and long hair looks the spitting image of how my mate’s ten year old will look in a couple of year’s time. This girl is stunning. She’s in that fascinating stage between being a little girl and a woman, right down to the blue eye shadow and red lipstick that it seems most girls start with when they first begin putting the stuff on. I jokingly mention to my mate as he look at her “oi, you old perv, that’s exactly what your daughter will look like in a couple of years” “Tell me about it, but she’ not there yet!” We laugh heartily at what, let’s face it, is rather dodgy territory for discussion, particularly as we’re both probably thinking what we’d like to do with this girl. “We should be disgusted with ourselves” I say. “You’re right,” say my mate, “but the thing is, when we were at school, the first time we ever noticed girls were a different species was when they looked like that and that sticks with for life as your basis for what a shaggable bird is” There may well be truth in this. I mention that I think this young lady next to us is probably younger than the girls we first started to lust after and want to snog at school, but how can I be sure? I’m a forty year old looking at someone anywhere between 12 to16, not a 14 year old doing it. How can we relate who we are and what we feel now against what we felt then? Plenty of people have tried recently. By joining Friends Reunited and doing naughty things with the 30 something year old version of the 14 year old they sweated bullets over all those years ago, having caught a flash of their knickers in the playground; finally requiting what probably should have remained unrequited; but it’s not the same. So as our wives continue to discuss make up and diets we hatch our plan and do what all good blokes should do. We invent a time machine.
“see,” my mate says “what you need is to be able to have a couple of weeks where you can go back and have a second go at all those moments in you life where you really, really wish you’d said something different, not done something, agreed to help when you didn’t”. “Yeah, I agree. What moment would you visit first?” “Well….” he says and then it becomes obvious that where you could choose to use the Time Machine to witness Jesus dying on the cross, use it to see Dinosaurs roaming the earth, use it to see if that third English goal really did cross the line, we would, in fact use it in attempt to try and shag all those women we, for some reason or other, felt we had missed out on all those years ago. Brilliant. The greatest invention known to man and we’d use it to fuck women from our past. Of course our discussions don’t start quite so bluntly. It’s how great would it be to go back to school in the summer of 1982 again? Wouldn’t it be great is we could just go back to working at such and such an office? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to spend a day on that holiday again? But of course there is a caveat. We have to go back knowing what we know now. We don’t want to go back and be a 14 year old again, we want to go back as a 40 year old coz, let’s be honest, that’s the only way it would be fun. We want to go back, it turns out, coz at each of these places there was a girl, and knowing what we know now, we want to say something different, do something different, even act somehow different based on what we know now, in the hope that this will lead that moment, that day, perhaps our lives somewhere it didn’t go – usually into bed with a girl. Let me give you and example. Portugal 1982 – Praire de Rocha. I meet a girl and we get on great. One day we go up to my room and we’re in the lift. I check when we get to my room, that little bruv is out and the connecting door was locked. Kerry jumps on to the bed. I tell her I’m going to have a shower and joke that she can come and scrub my back if she wants. She doesn’t come and do it. End of story. Except, we kept in touch, and once we got back she told me, over the phone as we lived miles apart, that whilst we has been in the lift going up to my room, she has wanted to grab hold of me and shag my brains out. I have been kicking myself ever since, particularly as she then said she didn’t think I fancied her, which was mental. Obviously, this is a time machine moment. Whizz back to the lift, take control and grab hold of her on the way up, Bob’s your uncle. Missed shag no more. You pop back to the future, lust satiated, no harm done. Ah, and that’s always the point isn’t it? Caveat number two. You go back and do these things, but you don’t want the to change the here and now. Or more specifically, change now for the worse. Let me explain. I go back in the time machine, we shag, fall madly in love and live happily ever after raising rugrats and living a life of luxury and fast cars – ok. Or perhaps, this 15 year old girl gets pregnant, keeps the baby, you end up in a council flat with her with no qualifications, no job, spend your life pumping gas and wish, at your fortieth do that if you had a time machine you’d go back to that moment in the lift and most definitely NOT lean across and kiss the girl and then everything would turn out perfect in the end…….
So perhaps the time machine isn’t the best idea. Here we are, me and my mate, both married, both doing alright, drinking £40 champers and £30 port whilst taking in the best view in London. Yeah, we might have a better wife, a better life if we’d had our time machine and could go back and change those moments, but, as I sit here crying with laughter as we relive moments from our youth, moments from our holidays, moments from our shared pasts that yeah, the time machine would be a great laugh, but the really important thing is that you really don’t want it to change the now, and so really what is the point?
Anyway, as we’re chowing away a couple and their daughter come and sit at the next table to us. And I’m struck by how the daughter, all stick thin arms and legs and long hair looks the spitting image of how my mate’s ten year old will look in a couple of year’s time. This girl is stunning. She’s in that fascinating stage between being a little girl and a woman, right down to the blue eye shadow and red lipstick that it seems most girls start with when they first begin putting the stuff on. I jokingly mention to my mate as he look at her “oi, you old perv, that’s exactly what your daughter will look like in a couple of years” “Tell me about it, but she’ not there yet!” We laugh heartily at what, let’s face it, is rather dodgy territory for discussion, particularly as we’re both probably thinking what we’d like to do with this girl. “We should be disgusted with ourselves” I say. “You’re right,” say my mate, “but the thing is, when we were at school, the first time we ever noticed girls were a different species was when they looked like that and that sticks with for life as your basis for what a shaggable bird is” There may well be truth in this. I mention that I think this young lady next to us is probably younger than the girls we first started to lust after and want to snog at school, but how can I be sure? I’m a forty year old looking at someone anywhere between 12 to16, not a 14 year old doing it. How can we relate who we are and what we feel now against what we felt then? Plenty of people have tried recently. By joining Friends Reunited and doing naughty things with the 30 something year old version of the 14 year old they sweated bullets over all those years ago, having caught a flash of their knickers in the playground; finally requiting what probably should have remained unrequited; but it’s not the same. So as our wives continue to discuss make up and diets we hatch our plan and do what all good blokes should do. We invent a time machine.
“see,” my mate says “what you need is to be able to have a couple of weeks where you can go back and have a second go at all those moments in you life where you really, really wish you’d said something different, not done something, agreed to help when you didn’t”. “Yeah, I agree. What moment would you visit first?” “Well….” he says and then it becomes obvious that where you could choose to use the Time Machine to witness Jesus dying on the cross, use it to see Dinosaurs roaming the earth, use it to see if that third English goal really did cross the line, we would, in fact use it in attempt to try and shag all those women we, for some reason or other, felt we had missed out on all those years ago. Brilliant. The greatest invention known to man and we’d use it to fuck women from our past. Of course our discussions don’t start quite so bluntly. It’s how great would it be to go back to school in the summer of 1982 again? Wouldn’t it be great is we could just go back to working at such and such an office? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to spend a day on that holiday again? But of course there is a caveat. We have to go back knowing what we know now. We don’t want to go back and be a 14 year old again, we want to go back as a 40 year old coz, let’s be honest, that’s the only way it would be fun. We want to go back, it turns out, coz at each of these places there was a girl, and knowing what we know now, we want to say something different, do something different, even act somehow different based on what we know now, in the hope that this will lead that moment, that day, perhaps our lives somewhere it didn’t go – usually into bed with a girl. Let me give you and example. Portugal 1982 – Praire de Rocha. I meet a girl and we get on great. One day we go up to my room and we’re in the lift. I check when we get to my room, that little bruv is out and the connecting door was locked. Kerry jumps on to the bed. I tell her I’m going to have a shower and joke that she can come and scrub my back if she wants. She doesn’t come and do it. End of story. Except, we kept in touch, and once we got back she told me, over the phone as we lived miles apart, that whilst we has been in the lift going up to my room, she has wanted to grab hold of me and shag my brains out. I have been kicking myself ever since, particularly as she then said she didn’t think I fancied her, which was mental. Obviously, this is a time machine moment. Whizz back to the lift, take control and grab hold of her on the way up, Bob’s your uncle. Missed shag no more. You pop back to the future, lust satiated, no harm done. Ah, and that’s always the point isn’t it? Caveat number two. You go back and do these things, but you don’t want the to change the here and now. Or more specifically, change now for the worse. Let me explain. I go back in the time machine, we shag, fall madly in love and live happily ever after raising rugrats and living a life of luxury and fast cars – ok. Or perhaps, this 15 year old girl gets pregnant, keeps the baby, you end up in a council flat with her with no qualifications, no job, spend your life pumping gas and wish, at your fortieth do that if you had a time machine you’d go back to that moment in the lift and most definitely NOT lean across and kiss the girl and then everything would turn out perfect in the end…….
So perhaps the time machine isn’t the best idea. Here we are, me and my mate, both married, both doing alright, drinking £40 champers and £30 port whilst taking in the best view in London. Yeah, we might have a better wife, a better life if we’d had our time machine and could go back and change those moments, but, as I sit here crying with laughter as we relive moments from our youth, moments from our holidays, moments from our shared pasts that yeah, the time machine would be a great laugh, but the really important thing is that you really don’t want it to change the now, and so really what is the point?
# posted by Bucko! @ 8:39 AM 
