Evidence of my Time Travel!!!

Okay – I am in complete shock. It seems that evidence of MY OWN time travel – time travel that I as yet know nothing about; that for me has not happened yet – has been uncovered at the Mayakovsky museum. At the moment I have no idea what to think about this, or what to do about it, but this is what has happened:

Yesterday I had my meeting at the museum, at which the new director, who was visibly shaking with nervousness and unease, handed me an envelope with his name and my name on it, with an instruction (written by whom we don’t know) for him to give it to me (“Rosy Carrick (Leaver)”) specifically THIS Summer – the Summer of 2015. The entire museum building has been undergoing repairs for the last two years, and this envelope was found by workmen amongst a boxful of other old photos, letters and documents. 

Inside was another, much older envelope, which has obviously been opened at some point, and half of which has disintegrated/been ripped away. The postage date stamp on the back says the 7^th August 1934. On the bottom half is just a simple address, to Vsevolodivich Snegiryov (there is no first name, but maybe that is on the torn off part on the bottom left of the envelope), No. 8/12 Andreevskaya Street (a small street far out of the centre in the South West of Moscow).

The top half of the envelope has the address of the sender:

Klyazma Halt (“polustanok” – which translates literally as  “half the machine”, or “half the machine tool”),

North Railway Road.

Klyazma is the name of a factory, but I don’t know what sort.

And inside this envelope was this letter, dated 1928:

At the moment I am getting ready to leave Moscow and come back to England. I have the letter with me and will start to deal with it when I get home, but for now... is this not completely insane?! I have spent the last month tracing Mayakovsky's footsteps on the streets of St Petersburg and Moscow, and thinking about the uncanniness of watching a show in the Stray Dog, of standing at the front door of his house in Zhukovsky Street, of walking along the cobbled streets of Kuznetsky Most and, yesterday, of walking up the stairs to his own office room in Lubyanka passage, the place of his death. Can it really be that I have not only been tracing our movements through the same space but different times, but that I was in fact really there, in his time too?

When I first met Yelena in 2012, she frequently commented on our immediately close relationship. I had been a little worried about going to stay with an 86 year old woman about whom I knew nothing at all except that she was the daughter of Mayakovsky, but in spite of this, and of the massive age gap between us, we got on extremely well, and it was like we'd known each other for years – so much so that when she gave me a copy of her book, Mayakovsky In Manhattan, she wrote this dedication on the first page:

I am now beginning to question everything in my past in a way that is making me feel quite crazy. I have to go to the aiport to go home now so I can't write anymore, but I will decide what to do when I get back.

How To Be Magic!

The day after tomorrow I go back home, and tomorrow I am meeting for the first time the new director of the Mayakovsky museum, Alexei Lobov. For the last week he has been sending me quite insistent emails, first about how I should call him as soon as I arrive into Moscow from St Petersburg, and then to vehemently concretise our time and day of meeting. It's very nice to be so eagerly anticipated! I was put in touch with him by Yelena, Mayakovsky's daughter. Alexei went to New York to meet her a while ago, and by all accounts he is a pretty cool dude. I'm meeting him at the actual museum, which has now been closed "for repairs" for at least a couple of years, so I am hoping to get a sneaky peek at what's been going on there.

It has been so wonderful to be back in Moscow – I have never been here in the height of Summer before; everyone is happy – many people have stopped me on the street to chat (very unusual in Russia in my experience!), and everything seems full of wonder, which in turn has made me think about the practice of magic, and how common it is these days. I frequently think of myself as a magic person, not because I'm a loon but because it's true. After all, to perform magic is to change or influence events or situations in mysterious ways, and we do that all the time – it's just that we're so used to it that we don't call it magic anymore because we understand more now than we did in ye olden days. Here are some examples of my recent magicking:

1) Usually I am extremely late for everything, but this year for my birthday my brother Edward bought me a special device called a watch. The wearing of this watch has made me be on time for at least 20 things since May. Simply by checking the numbers on something which measures out time in exact correlation with every other time device in existence in my time zone, I am able to know what I need to do and when I need to do it. The magic even seems to work when I have no idea where I am and how long it will take me to get to where I am going; on several occasions like this I have nevertheless arrived exactly on time or even two minutes early! You can do this too – all you have to do is strap the watch to your wrist and look at it quite often.

2) For the last month I have been in Russia. On many occasions I have gotten lost in unknown streets, with no idea where I am or how to get to where I'm going. However, with the help of a special talisman called a map I have been able to find my way every time. The "map" is essentially a miniature two dimensional representation of the real world, so by looking at it as though you are a giant, gazing down on the whole city in one glance it is possible to find your place physically (by looking at a street sign for example), and then to find and contextualise that place on the map. I pity the fools who do not have this magic at their disposal, because it can be impossible to know what to do without it.

3) My daughter Olive very often loses her belongings at school – usually her school uniform. To stop this happening I have begun the practice of writing her name on all her stuff. This way, simply by looking at it, people know to whom it belongs, and it is eventually returned to her. The same goes for P.E bags – every child has exactly the same one but they know exactly which is their own based on which markings they see written on the front of them – a very useful kind of magic indeed.

4) Languages. The first time I ever visited Russia I barely spoke any Russian at all and, although it was a fun experience, it was also quite terrifying. This time I feel much happier and more relaxed, and the reason for this is that I constantly practise and do my best to learn the Russian language. This language is merely a sort of magic code – without it it is impossible to communicate with anybody at all, but with it, suddenly you see new meanings and significance in everything; doors of opportunity open to you in all directions (a bit like in the film Labyrinth when the worm shows Sarah that, with a slight change in perspective, it is possible to walk through ostensibly solid walls).

5) When I went to get my visa registered in St Petersburg, I entered the necessary building on the ground floor, but the office I needed to get to was on the top floor. Hard to believe, I know, but there were no flights of stairs anywhere for public use! But what they did have was a small, metal, mirror-lined room called a lift. All I had to do was to go inside and press a particular button. The doors shut, and when they re-opened I found myself in a completely different space to the one from which I had entered – and was now on the very floor I had needed to get to! It was crazy!

This practical approach I take to magic is the same one I take to time travel – and judging by the results of my research on the latter so far, it seems that the prospects of doing so are very good indeed!

Wormholes – what they are and how to use them!

“For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.” – Einstein

As we know, a "wormhole" is the name given to an area of warped spacetime through which light and matter might pass. The term was coined in 1957 by the American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler, although the idea itself had already been theorised in 1921 by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl in connection with his analysis of mass in terms of electromagnetic field energy. Stephen Hawking describes wormholes as 'tiny shortcuts through space and time [that] constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world [which] actually link two separate places and two different times.'

Evidence of wormholes opening up on earth has been recorded on innumerable occasions throughout history – the most recent of which took place on a residential street in Brighton just a couple of years ago. 

The first point of consideration for any time traveller is to make certain that their chosen wormhole bridge is actually traversable, by which I mean that both its entrance and exit are and will remain open, and that its walls are not in danger of collapsing. A bit like kissing (only in the inverse), both mouths need to be open for tongues to find their fullest footing, else it gets a bit embarrassing.

Once the traversability of the wormhole has been established, a human would need two things to proceed: (1) a device to increase the diameter of the wormhole to a size which could physically accommodate the human body (and its vessel) – in their natural state they are much too small to do so, being only a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across, and (2) a vessel that could travel at the speed of light (or somewhere close to it – let's say for now at least 50,000,000 mph). An alternative to the first consideration would be to create new larger sized wormholes ourselves. Obviously this would take an enormous amount of power, as well as extremely advanced technology, but the successful completion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) indicates that such a thing is possible.

With these factors in place, Hawking theorises that the trajectory of the time machine would play out thus:

In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth

After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future.

The key element of this description for me is its final phrase "into the future". According to Hawking, time travel is only possible in a forward direction. Going back in time is impossible because it violates the fundamental rule that governs the Universe: that cause must come before effect and not the other way around. As a result, he says, 'as soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole.'

An alternate theororetical method, put forward by Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever in 1988, is this: that one does not attempt merely to move through wormholes at the speed of light (thus limiting oneself to forward-facing travel only), but to actually manipulate and reposition the wormholes themselves. In this way, travelling backwards in time is possible, but within specific limits – it is impossibe to travel back to a time before the technology you use to do so was created, because that is the point at which the earliest static wormhole exit point will have been established. So if I set such a thing up this afternoon for example – and tether one end of my chosen wormhole here in my St Petersburg hostel room, then nobody who goes on to use my technology will be able to go back to yesterday, regardless of when and where they position the other end of this wormhole bridge – today is necessarily the ultimate backwards destination of their travel.

This limitation has been disputed however, and I too am in disagreement. Yet again it comes back to looking at what we perceive to be possible right now instead of investigating what might be possible with further research and development. For example, to suggest that time travel before the point of invention is impossible assumes that the technology used is static (in both time and space). If the technology could be developed as a mobile device which would allow specific points to be plotted out for each individual journey – both forwards and backwards – and from any mobile location, then I see no reason why the traveller must be limited to specific routes. It is like using your own car rather than taking a bus. If I am in Brighton and I take the no. 7 bus to the marina I know that I will only go as far as the marina, and that even if I stay on the bus as it goes back through its route, I will only go as far as its starting point: George Street in Hove. With my own car I can stretch out as far as I like in either direction. All I would need to do is learn to drive, buy a street map of Brighton and Hove and buy a car: Experience, knowledge and a means of transportation. This point is connected to my disagreement with Hawking's theory that any attempt to go back in time would cause a collapse in the wormhole. Using something like the LHC to develop new wormholes (rather than seeking to expand pre-existent ones) would preclude this kind of failure. Of course, an attempt to travel backwards in time might take the traveller to a parallel universe whose history would begin to diverge from their original history after the moment they arrived in the past (we need only watch Back to the Future to realise that!), but that is another concern for a different day, and perhaps a risk one must simply be prepared to take...



 

Voices from The Past

Something I like very much about Russia is that people on the tube are very considerate of other people on the tube. This comes as a great and wonderful surprise to anyone whose main experience of the underground system is in the dog-eat-dog environment of London, and it changes the whole atmosphere of the journey. Young people leap up without a moment's hesitation to offer their seats to older people – especially for women – and older people in turn get onto the trains with a sense of expectation that they will be taken good care of, which they always are.

That really has nothing to do with this post more generally however, which is about something that happened to me whilst I was on foot, not in the metro. I was walking down Italianskaya street in St. Petersburg after visiting the Stray Dog cafe, where Mayakovsky and all his buddies used to hang out in the nineteen-teens, and I saw a little antique shop, from which I bought a couple of old written-on postcards. I have always loved old postcards and photos; it seems very odd to me that you can buy intimate photos and letters long after their subjects/recipients are dead or, rather, I suppose, odd that these things can be sold by completely unconnected future people. The notes scrawled on the back of these kinds of artefacts are to me a kind of time travel (though perhaps not in the traditional sense) – just as when you consciously create a time capsule and hide it away somewhere you are very much aware that your purpose for doing so is to allow the people of the future a vehicle via which they might catch a breath of your time – a time they themselves may never have seen (I did this with my dad in 1989 or so – we hid the capsule behind the brickwork of a new fireplace we were putting into the living room. That house has since been converted into flats, so perhaps it has been lost to time for good.) Of course, this form of time travel only works one way. We can't create a time capsule from the present and hide it for the people of the past to find. Not for so long as we abide by our understanding of a linear, forward-moving structure of time at any rate. Although I suppose that even on the basis of that understanding it would be possibe to create a time capsule at some future date and place it at some point in the past, so that it will be discovered in the future, in relation to that past point in time, but still technically in the past, from the point of view of the future date at which it was created and deposited.

The postcards I found were very interesting – one of them especially so. I find cursive cyrillic handwriting extremely difficult to understand, so I asked a Russian friend to help me with their translation (thank you Iryna!).  This is the first (to me, less interesting) one:

In wonderfully intertextual style, its main import is to ask its recipient if they have received the sender's earlier package and letters. The date on it is the 17th October 1943.

This next card is the more interesting of the two:

 The postcard itself, which has a picture of one of the fountains at Peterhof Palace on it, is dated May 4th 1916, but there is no date given in the message, which is in pencil and very faint and difficult to read. At first I thought the first word was "Вой" ("Voi"), which means "howl" in Russian, and I thought what a cool way to start a postcard! HOWL! However, according to my friend it actually says "Vol", short for Volodya, which is the familiar version of the name Vladimir, and is a card from a woman, telling a man (Vol) "I really want to go here!" (i.e. Peterhof I suppose), and then the initials F. Zh. (Ф. Ж.) – and THIS is when it started to feel like rather a strange coincidence. The reason I bought this postcard in the first place was because I myself had super wanted to go to Peterhof palace last week, but my extreme hangover prevented me from doing so – to find out not only that this is what the very message on the card says too (minus the hangover bit), but that it is written to a man named Volodya, and found on the very street on which Mayakovsky spent all his time during that same period, seems to me to be pretty remarkable! Volodya is what all Mayakovsky's friends and family called him, and is also the name of my forthcoming collection of his poems.

The question is, who the devil is F. Zh? All Mayakovsky's main romantic liaisons have been pretty well documented (not only by his biographers but also explicitly by the poet himself), but to my knowledge none of them had these initials. I ran a Google search for those two letters + Mayakovsky and although interestingly I did come across this short film about him on the Archive F. Zh. YouTube channel, I soon discovered that those particular letters stand for "Faculty of Journalism" (specifically at the Tomsk State University), and not for some as-yet unknown but enthusuastic Mayakovsky-lover of the early 20th Century!

Any ideas or information on the matter would be gratefully received.

Mayakovsky's Theories on Time Travel

I made clear in my first post on this blog that the central reason for building a time machine has to do with my plan to go back to the year 1930 to meet the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky himself was extremely interested in the concept and potential reality of time travel, and here I will lay out the key examples of his writings on the subject, which to me are very interesting.

As early as 1917 in the poem 'Man' Mayakovsky wrote about leaving earth in despair and returning to St Petersburg, thousands of years later, only to discover that the Mayakovsky of the past had shot himself in the doorway of Lili Brik's house on Zhukovsky Street, where he too had been living at that time, and that the street's name had since been renamed Mayakovsky, after him. In fact, although in real life Zhukovsky street has retained its name, one of its intersecting roads has since been renamed Mayakovsky Street after the poet who, as we know, did indeed go on to shoot himself in 1930.

In his poem 'About This' (1923), Mayakovsky first sees the figure of himself, as described in 'Man', hanging over the railings of a bridge over St. Petersburg's Neva river, and begging to be released from them, and later grasps madly into the future towards the prospect of immortality as he appeals desperately to "Comrade Chemist" to be one of the first to be resurrected in the distant future by Alexander Bogdanov's blood transfusions:

Regard him
                     the quiet, highbrowed
                                                            chemist
before the experiment
                                     his brow is furrowed
His book—
                     “the entire planet”—
                                                       he searches for a name.
Resurrect someone?
                                  In the twentieth century?
— Mayakovsky for example?…
                                                     We could find someone better —
Just some pretty poet
                                   won’t do.
 
I cry
        from off
                         this very same
                                                     page:
— Quit riffling!
                               Resurrect me! 

 

In his 1925 futuristic sci-fi poem 'The Flying Proletarian' Mayakovsky "just for a joke" describes Russian life in the far future (the year 3000 I think, but I don't have it to hand right now to check), a life in which everyone has their own private aeroplane, tables are self-clearing after mealtimes, baths, toothbrushes and razors operate themselves at the touch of a button, and people's daily work is described thus:


                         What they make, generally speaking,
is compressed
                            air
                                 for interplanetary travel.
Pop a tiny cube
                              into a cockpit of any size,
and you can breathe for days—
                                                               fresh, pine-scented air.
In the same way,
                                  ages and ages ago,
they’d make tasty broths
                                                 from Maggi cubes.
Similarly,
                   now they manufacture
                                                        from clouds
artificial sour cream
                                  and milk.
Soon
          they’ll forget
                                   what to call cows.
You’ll never
                       milk
                                 that much
                                                     from any cow’s udder!  


In his 1929 play The Bedbug, a bureaucratic philistine (often described as filthy and bedbug-like by Mayakovsky) is inadvertently frozen following a housefire, and is defrosted agan by scientists in 1979, only to be placed in disgust in a zoo alongside an actual bedbug who was frozen with him in 1929. Probably Cronenberg's The Fly found its inspiration from this very play!:

 "Klop" = "Bedbug"

Brundlefly!

Incidentally, the exact date on which this defrosting takes place is the 14th April – the same date on which, the year after The Bedbug was written, Mayakovsky killed himself.

 But it is in his final major work – the 1930 play The Bathhouse – in which Mayakovsky goes into the greatest detail on not just the notion but the specifics of time travel. This play, which was the poet's most explicitly satirical attack on the contradictions and hypocrises of Stalin’s increasingly bureaucratic society, was scathingly attacked in return by the literary bureaucrats of the State-run press, by whom Mayakovsky’s subsequent Twenty Years of Work exhibition was almost entirely boycotted. Soon after its release Mayakovsky killed himself, and his suicide letter included a note to one of the play's most bitter critics, Vladimir Ermilov.

The play play opens with two characters, Chudakov and Velosipedkin, in a basement. Chudakov is revealing his new invention – a time machine:

Henceforth the Volga River of Time, into which, by our birth, we were cast like so many logs for floating ­– cast, I say, to flounder and float downstream – that river will be subject to our control! I shall compel time to stop – or else to rush off in any desired direction and at any desired speed. People will be able to climb out of days like passengers out of a streetcar or bus. With my machine you can bring one second of happiness to a halt and enjoy it for a whole month – or until it bores you. With my machine you can make long-drawn-out years of sorrow flash by like a whirlwind. You just duck down, and the projectile of the sun will whiz over your head a hundred times a minute without once wounding or even grazing you, thus bringing your days of gloom to an end. Just look! The firework fantasies of H. G. Wells, the futuristic brain of Einstein, and the bestial hibernating habits of bears and yogis – all these are compressed, squeezed together, and combined in my machine!

[…]

Look closely. Do you see those two little bars, one vertical and one horizontal, with graduations like a ruler or a scale? […] With those little rulers you measure off the cube of the requisite space. Now look again. Do you see that dial there? […] Well, with that control switch you isolate the occluded space, and you cut off all currents of the earth’s gravitation from all other gravitational forces. Then, with those funny-looking levers there, you put in the speed and direction of time.

[…]

I’m giving you an explanation of universal relativity – how the definition of time is converted from a metaphysical substance, a noumenon, into a reality subject to chemical and physical action.

[…]

 Watch! I just touch this dial, and time picks up tremendous speed and starts to compress and alter the space we have compartmented here in this insulated chamber. At this very moment I am creating mass unemployment for all prophets, seers and fortunetellers.

[When Velosipedkin moves to transport himself into the future, Chudakov pulls him away, saying:]

Careful, you madman! In the future they may build a subway through here. If that happens, and you’ve interposed your puny body in the space where the steel tracks go, you’ll be instantly transformed into tooth powder. Besides, the cars of the future subway train may go off the tracks, causing a huge, unprecedented timequake that will smash this whole basement to kingdom come. So right now it’s dangerous to go in that direction. What we have to do is wait for the people coming from there. I’ll just turn this dial here very slowly, only five years per minute…

 The time machine works, and from the future – the year 2030 to be precise – emerges the mysterious "phosphorescent woman", whose interactions with the various characters Mayakovsky uses to lay bare his assault on Russia's bureaucratic philistines. Through her he also expresses his criticism of the sexism and misogyny of such characters, as she, through her dialogue with the female characters, tries to understand their situation – exploited both in their marriages and in the workplace at the hands of those very men who outwardly make a show of post-revolutionary gender equality. 

The phosphorescent woman's plan is to select a group of people to take back with her to the future. As they ready themselves for departure, she announces:

Comrades! At the first signal we’ll rush ahead, breaking through the old, decrepit time. The future will accept anyone who possesses even one trait making them kin to the collective of the commune: joy in working, eagerness to make sacrifices, unwearying creativeness, willingness to share advantages, pride in being human.

It is my belief that Mayakovsky was not merely theorising on the subject of time travel but that he somehow had first-hand experience of it or, at the very least, exact and technical information on the matter, and with this in mind I intend to consider his writings not just as creative representations but as practical guidelines for my own research.

 

Great Scott!!!!!!! — Великий Скотт!!!!!!!

Time in Russia is especially fluid, and as a result, Russia is full of what we might loosely term "time travel".

When I first arrived in Moscow last Monday (27th July) I felt an enormously intense feeling of happiness and magical anticipation, and – more than any other time I have visited here – a sensation of having come back to my own home. As soon as I got off the train at Paveletsky station and went down into the metro I was completely overcome with it. The Russian people have always been kind and generous towards me in the past, but this time that is different too – people are super friendly, in a way I haven't really experienced before.

After my last post, lots of people suggested interesting things for me to read and watch on the subject of time travel. So far I have watched the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Time Cop, and Jon Ronson's For the Love of... Time Travel episode. From the former I learnt two things:

1) that it is possible to go back in time and rescue people from death – i.e. that, contrary to the plot of the film Final Destination, death isn't some kind of inevitability which will happen no matter how we might try to avert it. (Whether we are prepared to theorise about time travel on the shaky basis of fictional scenarios featuring, respectively, J-CVD and Stiffler is another matter, but nevertheless it's interesting to trace the trajectory of time travel in popular culture.)

2) That the same matter can't occupy the same space at the same time. This one is kind of a bummer for me because I was hoping to be able to use time travel to have sex with myself one day. I also learnt that epic splits will probably save your life, so I had better start stretching my groin muscles, pronto.

From the latter, which I highly recommend to you, I was left with many interesting impressions, central to which were two things: the elasticity of time; and the links between time travel, time loops and alternate realities.

Firstly then, time as an elastic quantity. For me, this was perhaps summed up best of all by Father Christmas. Several years ago my daughter Olive wrote FC a letter in which she asked him how it was that he was able to deliver presents all around the world in one single night. Of course, as grown-ups, we all know that Father Christmas gets asked this question all the time, but nevertheless he kindly replied to her letter and explained that, contrary to what people think, time does not consist of regular, equal, immovable units, but is more like a piece of elastic which constricts and expands all the time without us really ever paying much attention; so great is our governing ideology on this matter that we refuse to acknowledge its inconsistencies even when they stare us in the face. This, he said, was why the most boring lessons in school seemed to drag on forever, and yet a fantastic birthday party is over in an instant. Usually, FC continued, we are at the mercy of this elasticity because, inevitably, for so long as we refuse to acknowledge it we are unable to exert any power over it. When, contrariwise, we open our eyes, and we begin to see what is really there, we can also begin to manipulate time's elastic nature for our own benefit. Thus, in his case, what feels like a single night for us is in fact a far greater length of time for him, and he is able to get everything done.

This concept puts me to mind of something my dad was talking to me about one time: that time doesn't exist; that the world we live in stands stock still and we alone move forwards in it. We walk the earth and in doing so we age; and so we create the idea of time to explain this process in a linear, forward-moving manner. But if it is true to say that there is no time then perhaps we can also say that all time exists everywhere at once. Today I accidentally walked the wrong way down Zhukovsky Street in St. Petersburg (where, for a time, Mayakovsky lived with Lili and Osip Brik, and the exact address of which crops up on several occasions in his poetry), which turned out quite well for me because it meant I got to walk back up its entire length, and onwards up to Italianskaya Street towards the Stray Dog cafe, where, before the Revolution, Mayakovsky and many other poets and writers met to discuss and perform their work. I felt very keenly the fact that Mayakovsky too had walked up and down these streets countless times, and that perhaps everyone at that time and everyone today are all walking together, but with our eyes closed to each other. I think there is there a film where something like that happens? Two people leaving each other letters in the same mailbox but from different times? One of the speakers in For the Love of... Time Travel claims to have had first hand experience of time travel of this sort – of, essentially, slipping into an unclosed pocket of past time, and then falling back out again into the current world. The question is: what if she had never come back? Would that alternate existence have continued with her in it, alongside this one, the one we all think of as being the sole and "true" existence for the reason that we ourselves happen to find ourselves in it? Indeed, I believe I myself may have slipped into some kind of alternate reality on two occasions in the past week in Saint Petersburg. Several days ago as I was just waking up in the morning, a strange man let himself into my flat, claiming that he lived here. He went into a room which, for the duration of my stay, has always been shut and locked. On a couple of occasions I have seen him, and we have had brief conversations about Russian language tuition and documentary film-making. Today I saw a used coffee pot in the sink, which I did not leave there. However, usually I only ever hear him: when I am in my bed I hear him in the kitchen; when I am in the kitchen I hear him in the shower; when I arrive home each night I call out a hello in case he wants to talk but I never get a reply. I don't know if he's here right now, but the hallway lights have been flickering an enormous amount. His name is Sasha, but that's all I know. Is one of us slipping in and out of the other's time-stream? Are we simply co-existing from various points in time?

My second experience is less personal. Whilst on a tour bus around St Petersburg I somehow accessed a portal to an alternate reality in which Jamie Oliver is not only Italian but also the famous chief of some unspecified tribe. Although I returned to this reality safely (or at least I think I did), I was able to retain the documentation of this slight alteration in circumstances.

 I haven't really gone into the concept of time loops here, but I'll focus on that next time maybe, alongside wormholes and Russian time travel theoreticians, because this post is already longer than I had intended it to be and now I am very tired and need to go to sleep. I welcome your feedback on my thoughts.