This isn’t what I planned. That’s for sure. And now I’m stuck and I don’t know what to do. I blame my friend Jennifer. There we were, sitting comfortably, swilling a semi-decent glass of Malbec and watching period drama on the TV. Jennifer’s massive 65 inch TV. She love’s period drama. I think she’s got a touch of the Bronte about her. Anyway, there was this scene along a city street set in about 1910 I suppose and the hero was toddling along to some appointment or other. Dressed in the spongebag trouser and morning jacket of the period, swinging a cane. Top hat. And spats.

“Have you ever worn spats?” She asked.

“No!” I said, “good grief, how old do you think I am?”

She laughed and then said that she thought the fashions of the time were marvellous and that she thought I would look pretty spiffy in spats.

We were back to being absorbed by the drama, but it got me thinking and by the time I’d gone to bed, dreamt a Malbec fever dream and woken up the next morning I had decided to build a time machine and take Jennifer to a time when chaps wore spats in town.

Surprisingly, it took me quite a long time to make a time machine. No one else seems to have had proper go at it and there was nothing much to help me on the internet. But I persevered. Essentially, all I needed to do was combine some victorian steam punk engineering, some levers, cogs and whirling speed limiters, a cunning means of accelerating instantaneously to way beyond the speed of light whilst remaining stationary, two seats and somewhere to stash a flask and some crab paste sandwiches and it would all be ok.

In the end it only took me fifty years. Of course, by then I was older and so was Jennifer. I’d spent the largest part of my life on a project that nobody except me understood or believed in. I was utterly broke and apart from my continuing friendship with Jennifer I was entirely alone, since most people appeared to think I was a bit ‘odd’.

Nevertheless, there it was. The working prototype.

It took me some time, several bottles of Malbec, a dinner for two in a candlelit restaurant and some chat to persuade Jennifer to come along but in the end she agreed.

“Remember the spats?” I said. That clinched it I think.

So we strapped in. In fact, we didn’t need to strap in because nothing was going to actually move, so we metaphorically strapped in.

I twiddled knobs, turned dials to 22 June 1910, 09:45 and said “are you ready?” Jennifer nodded and I pulled the two levers.

There was a great deal of whirring, flashing lights, some alarming clanking and then. . . .

Nothing at all. Literally nothing. We were both sitting in the contraption. I looked around and we seemed to be sitting in the middle of the night sky. It was dark and there were an incredible number of stars in every direction - including below us.

‘Ah,’ I thought.

Jennifer started to cry.

That’s when I realised the slight flaw in the plan. If only I knew at the outset what I now realised. What had suddenly dawned on me hit me with the stomach-turning lurch a biblical epiphany.

Time travel is fundamentally a misnomer. It’s not just time. It’s also irrevocably linked to space. Einstein knew it of course, but hey, who listens to nerds with bad hair?

The earth moves through space at 67,000 miles per hour as it orbits around the sun. Our solar system including earth, whirls around the centre of our galaxy at some 490,000 miles per hour and all of the galaxies in our neighbourhood are rushing at a speed of 2,236,936 miles per hour towards ‘the Great Attractor’, a region of dark matter 150 million light years away. So relative to my living room where we started, for every second of time I dialled in we were now 245 miles away. I had dialled in 3.8 billion seconds.

And we’d been here at least half an hour while I tried to work out what was going on, so even if I dialled in our starting time we’d be a minimum of 360,000 miles away from where we started. Or, to quote a well known TV programme title ‘Lost In Space!!!’

Bugger.

I asked Jennifer if she would like a crab paste sandwich. She didn’t seem keen.