Past, present, and future are not properties of four-dimensional space-time but notions describing how people process information. There can never be nontrivial causality violations. Past, present, and the future are not properties of four-dimensional spacetime. We cannot reverse the thermodynamic arrow of the the local environment! (a comedy...really!) Here is part of the first chapter;
Christmas Eve 2004
The hours pass and they are numbered against us. From a vantage position of one hundred miles in space, he appeared so unimportant and from the inaccessibility of forever the man appeared to have almost no substance at all.
Mr. Dennis Dogmore stood and swayed gently, for the wind was catching, at the top of Pier Hill admiring the rough dark gray sea which hugged the longest pier in the world, quite unconscious, even with his vivid medical imagination, that within a few short days, not only would he stare at the scene as no other human had or indeed, would ever see it, but that he had only a short time left in which to see it by.
He was a man of striking appearance for one reason only; he looked eerily like Eric Morecambe in height and weight if not in age. Complete with the exact same style of spectacles, a hesitant nature and a penchant for wearing crumpled suits, it was not surprising that strangers stared at him and rudely asked how Ernie was.
Whether he choose those heavy black frames consciously or otherwise is not known but when he laughed, which was not often, he certainly sounded like the famous comedian as well. But his physical appearance was where it all ended, for Dennis, although quick with a throwaway line, did not have the genius or the happy temperament of that august and dreadfully missed comedian.
The parking pole he held on to with one hand was wet from rain and in his other he held a set of seven keys. He jangled them, aimlessly watching and listening to the last train of the day enter the pier station after its one point three mile journey as dusk fell and the Christmas lights of the popular seaside town flickered on.
The few passengers, mostly day-trippers from London, soon to be discharged into the heart of Southend Upon Sea, were the only life forms Dennis saw besides the screeching incessant seagulls, which hung, swung, flew and played so ravenously in the sky. He was not surprised of course, being so close to the holiday period.
Tearing open a fresh packet of anti-acid tablets, he carefully placed two under his tongue, sucked down hard and tugged his green jerkin closer around him as another a gust of ice smacked him full in the face as it was prone to do, constantly blowing as it did off the lower reaches of the Thames Estuary.
Glancing at his huge calculator watch, he took note of the time and continued trudging up the steep hill until he reached the main shopping centre of the famous seaside town which hung so favourably (from an astronaut's point of view) on the Essex side of the liquid dark lifeline which served England's capital.
From the main money movers and shakers of the retail world locked in the pedestrian walkways, it was only a short amble to Harpers the jewellers situated on the West side of town in amongst a huddle of dilapidated shops. As he walked and fought the wind, Dennis, although a comparatively young man, clenched his jerkin around him with one hand while the other fixed tightly on his Street Safe personal alarm, a three in one antidote to his constant worry that he was about to be attacked.
He was convinced that the ear-piecing, 138 decibel blast plus the ultra violet identifier and the repulsive odour would defiantly fend off the juvenile villains, known locally as Oily Blags who skulked in every shadow and who, he was convinced, were about to attack him at any moment. But the honest truth was that, in the whole of his life, in the twenty-nine years that he had lived there, not once had he ever witnessed so much as a smidgen of violence against himself or his family so it was difficult to understand how his mild paranoia had begun.
But should you have interrogated his few friends, they would almost certainly be the first to point out that his excessive imagination was not limited in its pointing the finger at the criminal classes because his thoughts daily turned inward on himself where, most times, they just made his life a plain old misery.
If he hadn't a headache caused by a tumour, then he had ulcers caused by stress. If he felt flushed, then surely it was because his blood was too hot and that could only mean one thing-terror in the darkness. He had weeks where his teeth ached which surely meant the gums beneath were full of poison about to burst into his mouth, days when he became aware of every inhalation and exhalation of breath, every skin blemish and every ache. He watched his bruises thankfully recede and checked their diameters often, occasionally recording their sizes in a private notebook.
He inspected his eyes and nostrils weekly for things which shouldn't be in eyes or nostrils. He monitored his daily, and especially, his morning output visually and with litmus paper which meant he spent rather more time in the bathroom than his kitchen and he measured his fingernails weekly, anxiously comparing their lengths to the week before vie various homemade charts in some expectant hope that any difference in growth patterns would prove to the world that he really was a very sick man.
His doctor had given up, Dennis' file becoming even too large for the standard folder. His copious notes now rested in a large fat space at the bottom of a spare drawer. All the employees at the surgery knew where Mr. Dogmore's file was. He was, in short, a doctor's nightmare.