Gulliver then continued on with his travels bumping into an old man, although at least this time it was figuratively speaking. Gulliver asked the old man for the time, the man looked a Gulliver as if he were mad. When Gulliver asked the man who he was he said he was Old Father Time, however, since the gods had shaken things up around here, as he put it, and he had been given a gold watch, he was now retired. According to Old Father Time there was no longer such a thing as time, or at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Gulliver said that as he was at a loose end would he like to join him and his dog Beagle on his adventures, whatever they turned out to be. Old Father Time said as he had plenty of time on his hands why not, at least it would help to pass the time that no longer existed, and get him out from underneath his wife’s feet. Now when I say get him out from underneath his wife’s feet, I do mean get him out from underneath his wife’s feet. You see Old Father Time had a bad back due to carrying an old grandfather clock around with him upon his back, and his wife often stood upon his back to help him get back on his feet, literally! I hope that’s as clear as mud, good!
To say Gulliver was speechless upon meeting the Guardian of Time was undoubtedly the understatement of all time.
And so that was how Gulliver, Beagle and Old Father Time became friends. Gulliver later explained what had happened to him and this time it was Old Father Time’s turn to be speechless, in fact you could have said, ‘clock the look upon his face,’ if you’d had a mind to! This speechlessness lasted about as long as it takes the minute hand of a clock to circumnavigate the clock face. It was fair to say Old Father Time was rather talkative and compendious when words came out of his mouth. Later he apologized for this wordyness but said that being the Guardian of Time you didn’t get out much, this comment he was to explain later in minute detail.
This was the shortened version of events of Gulliver’s first meeting with Old Father Time. Gulliver wrote everything that happened to him on his travels in this world in shorthand in his book with no words in it. Later he wrote them up in his travelogue in longhand, B. because it took longer and A. because while on his travels he hadn’t the time to do so, not with the speed that events were unfolding around him. Gulliver wrote with a pencil which had a rubber attached to the end of it which saved him crossing things out and making his book with no words in it look messy. As I have mentioned before, it was Mark Twain who wrote that there were no wrong words, just words that needed crossing out, or some such nonsense. Gulliver thought Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain would have got on famously had they ever met!
‘So, Old Father Time, look I can’t really keep calling you Old Father Time, now can I?’ said Gulliver looking Old Father Time squarely in the eye.
‘Well, Gulliver, I’ve rather got used to being called Old Father Time, I’m not sure I want to change my name. It’s a bit like me saying to you, so, Gulliver, I can’t keep calling you Gulliver!’ Old Father Time said, making perfect sense.
‘Well, as long as you don’t mind. It just seems that as a name, Old Father Time is a little long-winded. What if you dropped the Old from your name, then I could call you Father Time?’ said Gulliver making just as much sense as Old Father Time had done previously.
‘Okay, I can live with that. I must admit being called old does make me feel a little old,’ Old Father Time said, continuing to make sense.
So that was how Old Father Time became Father Time. It’s true that as a story it wasn’t anything to write home about and in truth sending a letter through time isn’t exactly what you might call reliable! So instead Gulliver wrote it in his travelogue along with everything else that had happened to him since he jumped into the sea in Brixham in Devon to save his dog Beagle. After which, the book without words and without pictures in it that he’d bought from the Mad Hatter lookalike in The Pandemonium Emporium, now at least had words written within its white pristine pages, if not pictures.
However, it wasn’t long before Gulliver lapsed into calling Old Father Time Old Father Time and it was an even shorter period of time before Old Father Time stopped reminding Gulliver that he’d suggested he dropped the Old from his name. It was understandable that Old Father Time, being as old as he was, would forget this but after all, Gulliver was only a boy of thirty-five!
The first thing Old Father Time, sorry, Father Time did, was give Gulliver and Beagle the guided tour of Old Devonshire. This guided tour included the old aquarium, which contained sea monsters and other creatures of the sea like the kraken, a mermaid who couldn’t swim but had plenty to say for herself, and a giant killer whale who had lost all its teeth due to all the people it had eaten over the years.
This old aquarium was called an Antiquarium, which Gulliver very much liked the sound of and, as it was positively ancient, this made perfect sense, as did old books and an old book shop being called antiquarian.
Old Father Time showed Gulliver and Beagle around the Antiquarium which gave Gulliver a chance to draw some of the more weird and wonderful exhibits that were housed there. This now meant his book without words not only had words in it but pictures too. Now this was a good thing because it meant if they ever bumped into Alice in Wonderland she wouldn’t pull a face and say, ‘and what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?’ Well, in this parallel world just about anything was possible, no scratch that, in this world anything was possible, end of story!
How his grandfather would love this place, Gulliver thought and for the first time since he had returned to his childhood, which, as an adult had been one of his fondest wishes, a tiny piece of him yearned for his own time. Mind you this yearning didn’t last very long there was just so much going on in this world, that and after a while his old life was very much out of sight and out of mind. That was the strange thing about living in a world without time, with no clocks to remind you that time was slipping through your hands like sand through an hourglass, and as such, now it no longer felt like it was.
This reminded Gulliver of what Einstein once said, ‘Time is the biggest illusion of them all.’ Old Father Time even showed Gulliver what looked like an old rubbish tip or junk yard, where hundreds of thousands of watches, alarm clocks and old grandfather clocks had been dumped. It was like a graveyard for timepieces. Old Father Time said when he first saw it, it was both freeing and scary all at the same time. He then smiled and said the old jokes were the best and he should know!
After Old Father Time (who of course was now just plain Father Time having dropped the Old from his act, although he was still old), had given Gulliver the guided tour he took him back to his house. Once back at Father Time’s house, Gulliver met Mrs Old Father Time, sorry Mrs Father Time, or Old Mother Time if you prefer, which she did if you subtract the old from this title. The Times then introduced Gulliver to their three children, Nicholas, Holly and Ivy. Gulliver thought perhaps Father and Mother Time were a little confused because surely these must be the names of Father Christmas’s children, however they weren’t, so let that be an end to it!
Mrs Time then prepared a sumptuous meal at rather short notice for Gulliver and there were more than enough scraps left over to keep Beagle happy.
At the meal table Gulliver was keen to glean as much information on this world as possible, which was still called earth, which wasn’t unsurprising what with Devon being called Devon in this world.
Father Time explained that this world sat upon a giant antique globe which was exactly the same as Gulliver’s world, he said. But here Gulliver misunderstood Father Time for he meant this world literally stood on an antique globe covered in fish skin which the gods had placed there. This was said to be the beginning of this world and was written as such in a large compendium of rules which was said to be the word of the gods. The gods knew this planet to be called Compendium, translated from the Latin – Compendious Terra Firma, however, everybody else knew it as earth which was much less of a mouthful.
Once the gods had decided the general layout of the land and had drawn a rough map and covered the globe with it, they then coated the globe in several coats of varnish to make sure the map was waterproof. Every time a place was discovered the gods wrote the name of the newly discovered land on the globe. From time to time the gods would spin the globe and thus cause tidal waves, tsunamis and adverse weather conditions, which in turn threw some of the people upon the globe off into space. Then the gods commanded Atlas to hold this globe upon his shoulders as a punishment for getting marmalade on his atlas at school, until they could get a green marble statue of Atlas made, which eventually replaced the real Atlas. Old Father Time joked that at the beginning of time, Atlas looked as if he had the weight of the world upon his shoulders as he performed this Herculean task, which in truth he did. According to Old FT the gods had asked Hercules to hold the atlas globe up but at the time Hercules told the gods he was sorry but he couldn’t because he was busy washing his hair! The meridian of the antique globe was golden as was the base it was standing upon and along the curve of the meridian was written the degrees 80 at both poles, decreasing ‘70 60 50 40 30 20 10’ until they met in the middle at ‘0’. Gulliver knew in his world, Atlas was a Titan and was the titan of astronomy and navigation.
Gulliver knew a little bit about the history of the globe in that a man named Crates made the first globe atlas in 150 BC and back then globes were called gores. Gulliver also knew that the original globes were made out of stone, metal, marble, or in some cases, papier mache. Gulliver thought it was lucky this world wasn’t made of papier mache otherwise one long hard downpour of rain and it would be goodnight Vienna, providing there was a Vienna in this world!
The gods also had a giant statue of Pegasus, the winged horse, constructed in flight mode out of white marble. The statue was the size of the House of Babel times one hundred, which they placed on the globe in an area which would eventually be named Mesopotamia. The gods were going to place Pegasus in Sparta but to be honest geography wasn’t the gods’ strong point, Old Father Time said, with a smile on his dial the size of the face of Big Ben.
It was fair to say you really didn’t want to upset the gods in this world. Gulliver thought this was funny but not because it was odd, but, because as a child he had felt the world revolved around him, as all children did, like a globe revolved\spun on its axis. However, when he became an adult he realised it didn’t and Gulliver had often wanted to shout ‘stop the world I want to get off!’ and now in this world if he had a mind to, he could, well, in theory at least. However, one would have to say he would have had to be out of his tiny little mind to do such a crazy thing!
On the antique globe, in the precise spot the word ‘Greenwich’ was written, sat a huge antique compendium clock which had four faces, coincidentally like the one in Gulliver’s antique shop, although not quite. The first of the faces of the compendium clock was an astronomical one, the second a chronometer which could be used in all weather conditions, the third was a small hourglass which sand ran through, and the final face was a calendar. The clock was covered with a glass dome like a lantern clock and was illuminated like a lighthouse. This was where Mr and Mrs Time and their children lived before time ceased to be, this was a bit like the old woman who lived in the shoe, minus the shoe and plus the clock! (A reason for the all-weather chronometer was in case space debris, an asteroid, a comet or a meteor broke the glass dome.)
Mr and Mrs Old Father Time had lived in this clock since time immemorial, which was probably why both Old Father Time and his wife were as deaf as posts, or they were when they weren’t using their ear trumpets. This was because the chimes in the clock were ten times louder than if you were living inside Big Ben.
By the side of this clock sat an even bigger astronomical clock known as the Astrarium Chronometer, which although having somewhat of a complex mechanism pretty much took care of itself. Old Father Time only had to check this clock once a century. The Gothic-looking astronomical clock looked almost bare as if its casing had been removed to perform repairs. This revealed the inner workings of the clock with its numerous cogs, wheels, circular foliots, hammers and chimes. The astronomical clock had been going since the year dot and would be the last clock in the universe to stop, along with Old Father Time’s body clock, Old FT joked. Old Father Time said if the Astrarium Chronometer ever did go wrong, the cost for repairing it was astronomical, another joke which in Old Mother Time’s case almost always fell upon deaf ears!
Old Father Time also had a large moondial as well as an even larger sundial to check the passing of time on both of these celestial bodies, although once again these dials pretty much took care of themselves.
Gulliver had always been a little puzzled by the expression ‘as deaf as a post’. He had never seen an inanimate object such as a post before which had ears!
Old Father Time’s full title was The Guardian of Time and his job description was a simple one, to keep things ticking over, nothing more, nothing less. This was one job where clock watching was positively encouraged!
A back-up clock was provided by the gods in case the clock ever stopped. This was an even larger hourglass which the sands of time ran through. Old Father Time’s son kept an eye on this hourglass, making sure the mechanism that turned it was well oiled and thus ran like clockwork. There was also a large oriental candle clock as a further back up just in case all the lights in the universe went out! Old Father Time’s son was known as Old Father Time the Younger, basically he was Old Father Time’s apprentice and thus was known as The Time Apprentice.
Gulliver was surprised that Old Father Time didn’t have an atomic clock, which told time to the nearest nanosecond. When Gulliver said this to Old FT, as some of his friends called him, he replied with a world-weary smile upon his face, worn down by time, ‘Because the gods are a tight-fisted bunch!’
Gulliver knew that Leonardo Da Vinci had drawn up the plans for a clock that measured infinity. Twelve cogs of exponential size were to be connected in series, with the smallest gear completing one revolution per second. Each successive cog would rotate more slowly than its predecessor, until the final cog appeared to be entirely stationary. But that apparent standstill is deceptive; even the final cog would be turning (like the wheels and cogs of Da Vinci’s mind were always turning), albeit unimaginably slowly. It would take a billion years to complete one revolution! Even Father Time didn’t have that much time on his hands to clock watch, Gulliver thought, or at least he hadn’t until time had ceased to be!
Gulliver thought that if he invented a time machine he could then pick up all the great minds on his travels through time and create a think tank where these great minds like Newton, Da Vinci, Pythagoras, Einstein, Nostradamus, Archimedes, and Stephen Hawking, could think up fantastical inventions. How’s that for thinking outside the old brain box? Gulliver would probably leave Galileo standing at a bus stop thinking to himself, ‘Isn’t it always the way? You miss one time machine and then two appear at the same time!’
Another way-out thought had occurred to Gulliver, which was what if some boffin took all the theorems of the great minds throughout history and fed them into a super-computer programme. This would then create one giant synthetic brain which could solve all the world’s problems… I think, therefore I am. I over think, therefore my name must be Gulliver!
Old Father Time told Gulliver that these giant clocks took quite a bit of winding up as the keys were bigger than he was! Of course Father Time was just winding Gulliver up as he told him later, as the gods took care of turning the key in the clocks so they didn’t stop, well that was until they flew to sunnier climes. Old Father Time likened the gods’ moonlight flit to a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock that in spring had broken free from the shackles of its tether and sprung forth into the sky to fly where it may. Gulliver thought this quite poetic in its make up. Old Father Time said that on a slow day he often wrote poetry to pass the time. Gulliver wasn’t sure if he was yanking his pendulum or not! Gulliver knew a little of Greek philosophy and Greek history, although a lot of it was all Greek to him! Here Gulliver recalls the Greek’s philosophy on time which was, that the gods had wound the clock of the universe up, set it down and then just let time take care of itself, doing Old Father Time out of a job. It appeared in this parallel world that the gods weren’t so keen on letting time take care of itself, or at least they hadn’t been in the beginning when the gods created the heavens and the antique globe atlas that Atlas supported upon his back!
Two giant snow domes sat at each pole, one at the North Pole and one at the South Pole. Scattered across this old globe were hundreds upon hundreds of ships in a bottle where the lands resided like Devonshire. Obviously all these tall ships were laid in the bottle by the gods in the time-honoured fashion with the sails laid flat. The sails and the mast being attached to a fine twine as they lay flat upon the decks of the ships, which were of course laid longitudinally before being slipped into the bottle. After which the gods would pull upon the fine twine and hey presto, the ship was ready to sail, or it would have been had it not been set upon a wooden plinth in a bottle.
Of course! As far as Gulliver was concerned there was no ‘of course’ about it. ‘Of course’ was so far off course in this world that it had sailed off the edge of the earth and wasn’t coming back any time, let alone anytime soon! However, it seemed to Old Father Time, as it did to the people of this world, such fantastical and phantasmagorical things as their world being a giant antique globe, where giant ships in bottles and snow domes resided, was nothing more than commonplace and the most natural thing in the world.
Perhaps if your name was Darwin or you were a dog named Beagle it was natural but to Gulliver the words ‘of course’, which Old Father Time and the people in this world used as a matter of course, seemed wholly inappropriate.
Of course, to add to the confusion, from time to time when the gods got bored they would shake things up, literally, and time along with it. Luckily, most of the time the gods left the ships in the bottles and the snow domes alone. Although sometimes when the gods were playing silly beggars, England, otherwise known as Albion, ended up in Italy and Australia (known as New Holland when first discovered) ended up in Greenland.
However, this time it appeared that the gods had disappeared for good and weren’t coming back any time, sooner or later for that matter. This meant from that moment on, 1.30am Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday 17 March 1743 to be precise, funnily enough, time ceased and Old Father Time was made redundant. Old Father Time joked that before time ended everybody was asking him for the time and as soon as it ended people wouldn’t give him the time of day! Although people no longer gave Old Father Time the time of day, Old Father Time being the Guardian of Time was left a golden watch by the gods for services rendered. Of course, this gold watch was nothing more than a fashion accessory, like a fake Rolex was in Gulliver’s world, as the gods were as tight as Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s Christmas tale and just about as mean to boot!
Although Greenwich Mean Time had ceased to be, the sun and moon dials still kept ticking over, as did the astrarium, the large astronomical clock which was still recoding the space-time of the universe. Although technically Old Father Time was now retired, he still out of a sense of duty occasionally checked this astronomical chronometer, once in a blue moon.
Not only had time ceased but when the gods had shaken up time various time periods had got mixed up with one another. Luckily this didn’t affect the snow domes, the south and north poles, as there really wasn’t a lot there, although now mammoths could be found at both poles, as could the dodo, which got stuck there while migrating from a different time.
Old Father Time said that in ‘The Big Shake Up’ some of time had even been mislaid, while some had literally been lost in time. He also said that time was so complicated he couldn’t even beginning to explain how time had been misplaced or lost. All he knew was that it had been and Gulliver would just have to take his word for it.
Who was Gulliver to argue with the ex-Guardian of Time, after all, he had barely scraped through O level maths and physics, so he was more than happy to take Old Father Time’s word for whatever he told him. Although Old Father Time did say that without clocks, people were now very much reliant on their body clocks, and as such were very adept at guesstimating the right time.
When man was first put on the earth he just used the sun and the moon to tell the time so losing time wasn’t quite the disaster it might at first have appeared. After all, Stonehenge is probably just a giant sundial and even the earth has its own internal body clock.
‘If you look at things this way, the history books have been ripped up and the pages have been scattered to the four winds and beyond. In fact, it seems the rules for time travel have also received the same treatment. You could well say that history is history!’ Old Father Time said drinking down a large flagon of ale to wet his whistle before continuing on. ‘At the time of this catastrophic time collapse, something Nostradamus had predicted in one of the quatrains in his book, Les Phropheties, it seems from those ripped up history books that the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century got mixed up together and have now settled down comfortably side by side.’ Gulliver knew in his world both of these time periods were known as ‘the Golden Age’.
‘I recently met Queen Elizabeth I out in the street talking to Charles Dickens, and then I saw Sir Walter Raleigh out on a penny-farthing, or should I say I saw him fall off a penny-farthing. He probably didn’t have his sea legs with him at the time!’ Old Father Time laughed heartily. ‘Luckily the people from the nineteenth century are helping the people from the sixteenth century understand some of the latest inventions. Can you imagine when Queen Elizabeth I first saw a hot air balloon in the sky? Well, I can tell you, she nearly fell off her throne. And as you can imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg, well it would be if this was the north or the south snow domes!’ Old Father Time said chuckling to himself.
Old Father Time said that according to the legends and myths which were written down in sand-script and hidden in a cave somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. (Well you know what the gods are like, they love a bit of drama and mystery!) The gods had devised several games which they placed inside a wooden box which they called a compendium. Just for the record, the box was made by a guy called Jesus who was a carpenter. Now whenever the gods got bored they would take a game out of the compendium like Snakes & Ladders (although in this world it was called Sea Snakes & Ladders), Ludo, Drafts, etc. etc. and play the game until one of the gods won. ‘However, and here’s the twist,’ Old Father Time said smiling, ‘the pieces, or the pawns if you like, they would be using would take human form. The gods would move them across the board which would be the map of the earth. Dice would be thrown and pieces would be moved; most of the time the gods made the rules up as they went along.’ One thing was for sure, Old Father Time obviously had never heard of the word ‘compendious’! Gulliver, however, had heard of the word ‘compendium’ and knew that it not only meant a collection of board games in one box, but also a concise and comprehensive summary of information about a subject.
It was fortunate for the people of this world that the gods hadn’t heard of the game Spin the Bottle or Battleships, thought Gulliver dryly!
Old Father Time said there was a young engineer called Brunel who had constructed a giant hourglass which turned automatically every hour using a design of pulleys, leavers and cogs. Every city had one of these giant hourglasses and some people even had miniature versions on their wrists just so they could keep track of the time that no longer was.
Having thought long and hard about this it still didn’t sink in properly, so Gulliver thought about it even longer and even harder and still he couldn’t get his head round it. Anymore than he could get his head around this globe, parallel world, whatever it was he found himself stuck up to the neck in! Still, at least he was alive, unless this was heaven, or hell! Gulliver, like Alice from Wonderland, had a mind to wonder if there was a Flat Earth Society on this world, although he presumed it was called The Flat Globe Society! He also had a mind to wonder if some of the Chinese junk boats which had sailed off the edge of the globe atlas and into the cosmological oceans could now be said to be ‘space junk’!
Then Gulliver recalled the shop called The Compendium and the paintings upon its walls and now things started to make a little more sense, for in truth they didn’t make a lot more sense. Perhaps that’s why the gods had got bored and left, Gulliver thought wistfully, as they had found another world which had more sophisticated games like Xboxes and computer games! Gulliver then remembered the Einstein quote ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’. God may not play dice with the universe but it appeared at one time or another, the gods in this world had!
Old Father Time then chuckled to himself as he could see Gulliver was finding it hard to take this all in.
But that was the thing, you had to chuckle to yourself in this world otherwise you were likely to go mad, stark raving mad like the Mad Hatter had so obviously done having spent far too much time in the land of wonder, otherwise known as Wonderland, wondering about this, that and the other! Gulliver was later to write something similar in his travelogue and after it he wrote the words, ‘Compendious not Mark Twain was right!’ Later still, he drew a pencil line through the whole sorry paragraph!
‘Don’t worry, lad, in time things will become as clear as the Black Sea!’ Old Father Time said less than reassuringly. If the truth be told, Gulliver would have preferred if things were as crystal clear as the Mediterranean Sea rather than the Black Sea!
To Gulliver it seemed this world was ‘out of this world’, which was exactly what he wrote later in his travelogue. This short but concise sentence described this world to a T, minus all the waffle and nonsense, and was one he didn’t cross out, in fact, after it he wrote the word ‘compendious’, Charles Dickens eat your heart out! After he’d dwelt on things further, Gulliver thought, well, is my world that different from this one? If before the big shake up somebody from this time had ended up in his time wouldn’t they think things had been shaken up? After all, the continents had shifted and now people of all races, creeds and colours were mixed up with one another in all four corners of the globe. The main difference between the two worlds was time, or the lack of it.
This world and his own to some extent reminded Gulliver of a dream he’d had as a child and this is how it went…
Gulliver awoke from a dream as a hell of a racket appeared to be going on downstairs, perhaps the Mad Hatter was having a late-night tea party, he thought in his delirious state. However, when he got down into the living room all was quiet, although the books in the bookshelves had been pulled out and some of the books were strewn upon the floor. Gulliver looked around nervously, perhaps they had been burgled by a book thief who was searching for his signed copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that curiously enough he kept in a cabinet of curiosity in his bedroom. He searched all of the downstairs rooms but found no one. Gulliver then put the books back in the bookcase and ascended the stairs back to bed.
A few minutes later the noise started again. Perhaps it was a ghost, Gulliver thought, in which case it was best he ignored the noises and went back to sleep, which being a dream he already was. However, Gulliver put on a brave face and went back downstairs to once again find all was quiet but once again the books were strewn about the place. Gulliver happened to pick up Treasure Island and read a few pages as he thought it might help send him off to sleep. A few pages in he realised the story had changed, in fact, it had become mixed up with several other stories; characters from Peter Pan, The Lost World, and Hard Times had somehow ended up in Treasure Island. Not only had the words become jumbled up but so had the pictures, as drawings from Roald Dahl’s book James and the Giant Peach and Alice Through the Looking Glass were now in between the pages of the book Treasure Island.
Gulliver then picked up several more books and they were also jumbled up, fairytales with mystery stories, fictional books mixed up with non-fiction books, his mother’s cookery books were mixed up with his father’s fishing books; the whole thing was most curious and perplexing.
Gulliver just shut the books up tightly, leaving Peter Pan clinging to the edge of the spine of Treasure Island and the mad March Hare squashed between the pages like a bug. Gulliver feared he had gone stark raving mad like the Mad Hatter and went back up the stairs to bed hoping the nightmare might end. Ten minutes later the noise started again. Gulliver rushed downstairs determined to sort this mystery out only to find characters from all the books on the shelves either fighting with one another, dancing, or slipping in between the pages of the wrong book as if they were slipping in between the bedsheets. It was at this point that Gulliver really woke up (and I don’t mean woke up to himself either, although if he had a looking glass on his ceiling then I suppose he could well have done!).
This time Gulliver knew he was awake because he tried the old Alice in Wonderland trick and pinched himself several times and it hurt. Gulliver had always had wild and scary dreams ever since he was a very young child and still did up until this very day, and in all the weird, wild and wonderful dreams, Gulliver had never eaten cheese before he went to bed!
The last dream Gulliver had before he ended up in this world was of it raining words and letters, literally raining words and letters! And they weren’t little words either, they were big ones like, phantasmagorical, fantastical and presentiment, which according to the dictionary, which he had no reason to doubt, meant – sense of something unpleasant about to happen, which it was! And perhaps he wouldn’t have minded so much if the words and letters weren’t landing directly on his head knocking him to the ground. And some of these words were heavy like enormity, herculean and weighty. Gulliver felt like he was drowning in a sea of words which soon turned into a wild river which Gulliver was caught up in. Gulliver clung on to a giant letter Z for dear life as he was swept out to sea never to be seen again, end of story!
After this nightmare had ended and Gulliver had awoken he took the dictionary and thesaurus which were in his bedside cabinet and threw them in the harbour! Some dreams had you lost for words and this was such a dream, although not quite, as Gulliver later committed it to his dream journal.
Although Gulliver didn’t know it at the time, and not just because there wasn’t any time to know about, but his travelogue would be the first travelogue ever written without any times or dates within it. Now one might say this might make it a little\lot difficult to follow, but no matter, one day when Gulliver eventually finished his travels and put his journal to one side it was sure to make an interesting read. Or at least it would make a good paperweight or a bad doorstop!
‘This world must seem very confusing to every living person as well as the animals,’ Gulliver said when Old Father Time stopped speaking, as he wondered if Noah had ever had an occasion to get his ark out of mothballs and take it for a spin around the globe.
‘Well, it’s true what you say, Gulliver. At first both the people of our world and the animals didn’t know whether they were coming or going. However, eventually we all got used to it and now we don’t take a blind bit of notice of the way things are!’ said Old Father Time with a wry smile upon his face.
‘Is that why everybody is always bumping into one another?!’ Gulliver said with a similar wry smile upon his face, and then rather wished he hadn’t. ‘I told you!’ he said to himself under his breath, ‘funny in my head but not when I open my mouth!’
‘Yes, my boy, I guess it is!’ said Old Father Time as a broad smile broke out across his craggy antiquarian features.
‘I guess I am funny after all,’ Gulliver said still under his breath, but then again, with this being a parallel world it was only to be expected.
Old Father Time did add that, as this world was set on an antique globe, at least when you got close to a county or country the word would be written upon the land in large writing. This was especially useful if you were viewing this world from above, say for instance in a hot air balloon. The problem was of course, since the gods had shaken things up, it meant places weren’t where they once were. Devon was still Devon and London was still London but Devon might now be where London used to be and London might be where Devon used to be. It wasn’t in this case but some places weren’t where you expected them to be or at least weren’t where Gulliver expected them to be.
Just imagine for a moment, if you will, waking up on Christmas Day in New Holland (Australia) to find it snowing, which might well be a nice surprise. However, what might not be quite such a nice surprise is to find a polar bear in your back garden! For the reason it’s snowing is because New Holland\Australia is now where Greenland used to be and Greenland is, well, God knows where! Old Father Time let out a roar of laughter when he told Gulliver this that nearly shattered Gulliver’s eardrums.
Gulliver wondered if Sir Walter Raleigh was still living in Devon and whether any other of his heroes lived there too, like Sir Francis Drake. Perhaps he would get to sail on the real Golden Hind and not just stand on the replica which stood in Brixham harbour in his time. Well on this score only time would tell, except of course in this world it wouldn’t, or at least Old Father Time wouldn’t be the one telling you!
‘There is one more thing I should probably tell you,’ Old Father Time said as the smile dropped slightly from his face. ‘Because time has been shaken up here you may meet my younger self, in fact you may meet my middle-aged self as well. Most of the time this is a rare event as the world is a big place, and there is an awful lot of time to get mixed up, although I should probably amend that to was an awful lot of time to get mixed up. Now the rule of thumb (no, not Tom Thumb, this isn’t Gulliver’s Travels, well, it is but it isn’t all at the same time, but you know what I mean!), now where were we? Oh yes, measuring Tom’s thumb. Now the rule of thumb is if you meet yourself in time it’s best if you give yourself a wide berth, you certainly don’t want to be getting into fisticuffs with yourself in case you end up doing yourself in. Just like if you travel back in time and meet you parents and run them over on your penny-farthing, otherwise you won’t have been born, the old time paradox, you get the picture. However, now time no longer exists this will no longer be a problem as there is no timeline to disturb. So if you come across a book entitled The Time Traveller’s Guide, feel free to throw it on the fire!’ Once again Old Father Time laughed out loud at his own joke before he once again began to be compendious and not so compendious all at the same time!
‘I can tell you one thing, I’m certainly glad I’ve retired. Imagine all the different watches I’d have to have in my pocket to tell the correct time. It is strange that once time filled my every waking moment and now time means nothing to me. Einstein was right all along, time is the greatest illusion of them all. Perhaps I’ll become a magician, although I won’t be able to perform the old stopping of the fob watch routine!’ The smile on Old Father Time’s face quickly stretched itself out across his face as if it was about to break into a yawn, which a few seconds later it did, minus the seconds.
Gulliver remembered a conversation he’d had with his father, although as a conversation it left a lot to be desired as mostly it was his father talking at him. In this one-sided conversation his father said he should help himself. Now at the time Gulliver didn’t really understand what his father was getting at but now he did. If he met himself (Gulliver) he could help himself (Gulliver). For example if Gulliver got washed up on a desert island and met himself they could both help each other build a boat and then they could both row back to civilization. When they got back to civilization and people called out in jest to Gulliver, ‘Gulliver, how were your travels?’ both he and himself would turn round at the same time! His father was right, it made perfect sense, he had to help himself. Perhaps he hadn’t given his father enough credit, for a split second (which didn’t exist) Gulliver felt guilty about not listening to his father and made a mental note that when he got back to his time he would make it up to him while there was still time to do so.
After the conversation with the Times, both Mr and Mrs, Gulliver thanked the couple and retired to bed after what had been a very long day indeed. That day time had passed both quickly and slowly, while not passing at all.
That night Gulliver had some of the weirdest dreams he’d ever had in his life before now but as he was only twelve this wasn’t that surprising. However, in reality (whatever that was!) he was thirty-five, although to Gulliver’s mind it appeared to him he was neither twelve or thirty-five but a cross between the two. Gulliver was to maths what Archimedes was to the world of fashion (refer the Emperor’s New Clothes and the Eureka story!), but even he knew that if you added two figures together then divided them you would get another figure, which hopefully would be the sum of the two parts or something like that. This made Gulliver… twenty-three and a half years of age, which meant he would have to wait six months for his next birthday to come around.
In one of those weird dreams he had that night, he was sitting in his bathtub full of baked beans smoking a pipe full of bubbles and singing ‘the big ship sails on the alley alley-o, the alley alley-o, the alley alley-o.’
Talking about reality in this world was like a tightrope walker attempting to walk across a strand of gossamer over an active volcano. Actually it was nothing like that but Gulliver wrote the line in his travelogue just because he liked the sound of it. Quantum physicists and philosophers alike were always saying ‘what’s reality?’ and now Gulliver was beginning to say the same thing.
‘What’s reality?’ Gulliver said to a bemused Beagle, who was in fact a Labrador. Beagle just looked up at his master as if he had lost his mind. Perhaps he had lost his mind but where had he lost it, in this world or in the world he’d just come from? It was puzzle, all right. No, it wasn’t a puzzle, a puzzle was easy to do, even a 3D puzzle of the universe was easy to do compared with making sense of this world.
Gulliver later wrote in his travelogue: ‘This world is likely to give you a permanent migraine!’ Gulliver was right about one thing this world was tailor made for the exclamation mark.
Gulliver had never been very fashion conscious, however, he had noticed in this world how men dressed like women, in short dresses with high frilly collars or in pantaloons. He had often seen pictures in books and paintings of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh dressed in such a get-up and in truth, thought they both looked a right Charlie! Either that or the men of this world dressed in smart dark suits with waistcoats and cravats with top hats on their heads, or frock coats like he’d seen Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Oscar Wilde dressed in.
Women’s outfits between the sixteenth and nineteenth century didn’t seemed to be that different from one another, as women from both centuries wore long wide flowing dresses. Although once again the sixteenth-century dress was frilly and embellished with lace and was lighter while the nineteenth-century fashion went for darker shades. Vintage fashion was very fashionable in 2013 as it was in both the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, which was one thing that was most definitely something that wasn’t to be expected however, was that later Old Father Time told Gulliver that the antique globe was a part of a Grand orrery. This was a clockwork model of the solar system, Gulliver wasn’t sure if the Guardian of Time was winding him up or not?