{"id":242,"date":"2009-01-04T02:48:08","date_gmt":"2009-01-04T02:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/time-travel-2\/"},"modified":"2009-01-04T02:48:08","modified_gmt":"2009-01-04T02:48:08","slug":"time-travel-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/time-travel-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Time travel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/veghead\/sets\/72157612060260690\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3261\/3154302614_f990c8371d_m.jpg\" width=\"180\" height=\"240\" alt=\"colossus\" class=\"illustration\" \/><\/a>Now that we live in the future, a week can be compressed into less than a minute. Consequently, our eight day trip to London lasted around 85 seconds from start to finish. The memories are still intact but feel more like a dream than anything real. Oddly, while we were in London we felt similarly about the life we left behind in Philadelphia; it surely can&#8217;t have been real. Quotidian events, like taking a bus along Lee High Road, emphasised how real and normal that life was compared to the obviously ethereal dream of a life on a different continent. Now we&#8217;re back in our home, with our birds and our own settings on the thermostat. In a typical autistic male style, here is a list of some of the things we did while we were home\/away:<br style=\"clear:both\" \/><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Got ill. We both managed to have at least two days of snotty, hurty, coughy misery while we were there. Of course, we&#8217;re still ill now, but it&#8217;s just that tedious phase of permanent dreariness that lingers on for months after the main viral assault has been impeded. On the upside it&#8217;s quite a nice feeling to know we&#8217;ve smuggled in some foreign cold germs into America without getting caught by Customs or DHS.<\/li>\n<li>Christmas day and Boxing day! Too much food, too much drink, and an excess of quality telly! The Christmas Radio Times still gives me goose bumps when I get to the pages that eschew the day and date in favour of the magical titles &#8220;Christmas Eve&#8221;, &#8220;Christmas Day&#8221; and &#8220;Boxing Day&#8221;. It&#8217;s like normal life and time are suspended for a while, and instead you are encouraged to veg out in front of the TV watching christmas specials and old comedy films. BTW Brits: stop banging on about how crap the telly is these days. Alright, you have some tremendously banal shit available to you these days, but it&#8217;s still orders of magnitude better than what our American shit-pump has to offer.<\/li>\n<li>Lying in a bath listening to Radio 4. Sublime.<\/li>\n<li>Curry! Oh god we had a couple of arse-kicking curries while we were over there. Literally. In fact we spent our last night at home with my parents, my sister, and her boyfriend, eating a superb take-away and watching a tribute to Humphrey Lyttleton&#8230;could it have been any better ?<\/li>\n<li>Seeing friends. Actually we didn&#8217;t do nearly enough of this. But it&#8217;s indescribably enjoyable to meet up with people you really, really miss, and talk bollocks with them. The sad part is that on a short trip you end up spending all your time catching-up and never get a chance to chat the way you would if you lived back there. I miss the everyday after-work chats over a pint or two&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Pubs! Ever tried &#8220;Oyster Stout&#8221; ? It is the perfect lubricant for social interaction in a warm, welcoming, boozer.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/veghead\/sets\/72157612060260690\/\">Bletchley Park:<\/a> Mecca for geeks. There were 15 of us, plus two children, and it was fucking ace. I can&#8217;t describe how excellent it was to see everyone again.<\/li>\n<li>Air travel via Terminal 5. Call it modernism if you will, I call it being too tight to buy plasterboard\/dry-wall. 50 years ago I can imagine it being thrilling to see the inside of a lift as it goes up and down, but nowadays it just looks like they couldn&#8217;t be bothered to finish it properly. And the architects really need to be reminded that their artwork also needs to function as something beyond a big glass shed. It feels like a month before completion, one of the junior architects ran into the office in a panic shouting &#8220;Oh no! Where are we going to put all the aeroplanes ?&#8221; and was answered by the senior architect with &#8220;Oh yes, how tiresome. Couldn&#8217;t we stick them on the back somewhere, out of the way ?&#8221;<br \/>\nHow can anyone design a brand new air terminal, the purpose of which is to connect passengers with planes, so badly that it still <i>depends<\/i> on buses and trains to get the passengers from the departure lounge to the actual bit of airfield where the planes are ? It&#8217;s almost as if the architects have their heads stuck so far up their arses that they don&#8217;t know what the fuck they&#8217;re supposed to be doing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Nice to be home though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that we live in the future, a week can be compressed into less than a minute. Consequently, our eight day trip to London lasted around 85 seconds from start to finish. The memories are still intact but feel more like a dream than anything real. Oddly, while we were in London we felt similarly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}