So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different. And where are the hoverboards?

At New Year I always have to listen to songs about New Year, so I’ve had Death Cab in my head all day today, with the lyric,“I wish the world was flat like the old days and you could travel just by folding a map,” going round and round and round. And I just got really excited about this prospect, and actually started yearning for ‘flat earth’ days, even though I wasn’t around then to really know what it would’ve been like. I can imagine, though, and I bet it was weird, although at the time, it wouldn’t have felt weird because they didn’t know any different. But if you were to travel back in Time to those days, then you would be walking around thinking how funny and crazy things were. And then you’d probably catch smallpox and die. And you wouldn’t be laughing any more.

I’ve just had it pointed out to me that it would never have been possible to travel “just by folding a map”, even if the world was flat as a pancake. Which sucks, because I really like the idea of that a lot. Maybe I’ve watched too many scientists curving bits of universe-coloured card, or maybe I am still a bit wine drunk from last night, but this map-folding idea just seemed like it could work. Like the possibility was there even if the science wasn’t. Yet. I like the word “yet”. It’s a good word.

So we had the New Year midnight thing, and it was really good, and earlier, we’d tried to get the atomic clock up but t’interweb was being really slow, so we put the TV on instead, and after we’d celebrated and wished our happy’s and danced with our fists in the air to Solsbury Hill, we looked at the computer screen and it read 23:29. And it felt really weird, because we all thought for a second that we’d somehow jumped the gun, and it kind of felt a bit like Time Travel, and that we’d have to “do” New Year all over again, and try to remember what order we’d played all the good songs in. And I got that shivery nice feeling I get when the clocks go backwards or forwards and the hour vanishes or gets to be an hour all over again (even though it really doesn’t). And a part of me was a little bit disappointed that we didn’t jump the gun, and that the time we thought it was was in fact the real time. Because (a) I really really like the idea of Time Travel, and (b) because everything was so perfectly good that I would do it over and over again, and each time, I would pay attention to different things, and it would build up a fuller picture in my memory. Now I just want to watch Groundhog Day. Happy New Year.