millionreasons | The Time Machine

Nicked from

picosgemeos. You have a time machine, in which you can make three (and only three) trips. You may use one trip to change something in your own past, one trip to witness a past event, and one trip to change the world. No cheating, any attempts to game the system will dump you in a primaeval swamp with no way back to the future. What do you do with your three trips?

1. This is very first world problems, probably because there has been no tragedy in my life, but I would have gone to a different secondary school*. My parents took me to an open day at a better, more academic school and I was grumpy and obstreperous and refused to co-operate for reasons that I can't even remember. I think I didn't want to go to a 'snob' school (there's a Donny attitude for you). I was lazy and no-one pushed me, or they pushed me the wrong way and I gave up during my A-levels, passing them (badly) with no effort put in. I would have liked to gone to a better, properly resourced university, to have been as motivated to learn as I was aged 8. Teenage years are a terrible time to study the past.

2. I would love to witness the end of WW2 and the blooming of a new, fairer society. Although I wouldn't want to witness Hiroshima or live in the '40s.

3. I would (singlehandedly) stop the Norman invasion. As a Scandi-Saxon-Celtic melting pot of a country, I think that England was doing OK. Then the French came over, complicated our language, invented the class system, and instigated land-grabs that still resonate today.** Either that, or kill Thatcher in 1925.

* On the other hand, I wouldn't have been part of the Edlington Comprehensive school orchestra which won the National Festival of Music for Youth 1989, playing in the Royal Festival Hall, which gave me a taste for London and, sweetest of all, beating a private school to the prize.

** Although they did build some lovely churches and castles.