Great Scot!

At the moment, I am reading The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger, a novel I would recommend to all you people out in the great wide world.

Without spoiling the plot for anyone who does intend to read the book, it follows the stories of a time traveler, Henry, and his wife, Claire, whom Henry first meets when he is in his forties and she is eight.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of time travel, ever since my head was filled with Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, Transformers and Thundercats (which I estimate to have been sometime last week).

Back To The Future easily makes my top five films of all time, and HG Wells' The Time Machine was a novel on the subject I discovered whilst at university. (By 'discovered' I mean 'was forced to read for a Cultural Studies module').

Anyway, I've always been intrigued by the possibility that we could jump backwards and forwards in time as the fancy took us, if only we had the technology.

But as I have grown older and , allegedly, wiser, one thought on the subject has come to dominate my thinking:

By its very nature, if time travel technology is ever to exist, then it already does.

The fact that at no point in history to date have we come across time travelers popping up to say hello suggests, to me, that it never will. I'm not suggesting that if NASA or some similar privately-owned entity managed to invent a time machine that it would necessarily broadcast the fact. But I'm sure that if time travel became possible at somepoint in the future, some idiot would have magically appeared with the dinosaurs, at the Battle of Hastings, at Kennedy's assassination or on the pitch at a World Cup final.

So, I am now resigned to the fact that I will never get the chance to stop myself smashing up my first car only a fortnight after passing my driving test, prevent my brother sticking his hand in a coal fire, or hang out with The Beatles at Abbey Road.

I guess it's time to stop wasting money attempting to build a flux capacitor....