“I’ve picked out a few stocks I like the look of,” he said.“What do you think?”
I looked to see that he’d circled a number of companies witha yellow highlighter pen. I was horrified to discover that among the stocks hehad picked out were Woolworths, Northern Rock and JJB Sports.
“Mate, this is a really, really bad idea,” I said. “Trustme. You really don’t know what might be around the corner,” remembering thescenes in my head of Northern Rock’s panicked customers queuing around theblock to take their money out. “If you absolutely must put money into the stockmarket, put it into something bomb-proof like tobacco or pharmaceuticalstocks.”
“What could be safer than a bank?” asked Nick. “If yourmoney’s not safe with a bank, where is it safe: under the mattress?”
If only he knew, I thought, thinking of the financial crisisabout to engulf the world. “You’d be surprised,” I replied.
“And what about good old Woolies?” he added. “They’ve beenaround forever. They are as much a part of Britain as fish and chips.”
Not for much longer, I thought. Seeing that he wasdetermined to embark on this foolhardy venture, I thought I’d better at leasttry to minimise the damage. Sighing, I said, “OK, well at let’s go through theshare prices and see if we can come up with a decent portfolio.”
By the time we’d finished I’d managed to steer him away frommost of the companies that had gone bust, and point him in the direction ofbusinesses that I knew would still be around in twenty years’ time.
Satisfied that I’d done my good deed for the day, and withhim seemingly cheered up considerably, we got on with the serious business ofdrinking our way to the bottom of the blackboard.
A couple of weeks later I found myself waiting for my fatherto die in the very same hospital where I had breathed my last. There was ahorrible air of déjà vu about the whole situation, and I didn’t mean my usualday-to-day déjà vu.
Like father, like son, he, too, was dying from lung cancer,having been a twenty a day man for over 40 years. He’d lasted longer than Ihad, though. Perhaps the love of my mother had kept him going, but even so, 66was still too young to die.
He was in an awful state, a grey, pallid complexion,breathing through tubes and struggling to speak. This was exactly how I musthave looked and I thought how awful it must have been for Stacey, especiallywith her mother already dead.
Fortunately she was spared it all this time round. She wasonly seven years old now, and Sarah and I had both agreed she would be betteroff at school rather than seeing her beloved Grampy in this state. As hebreathed his last, on a baking hot Monday afternoon, I had cause to reflectthat for once, a death in the family had fallen outside the Christmas period.
In the weeks that preceded his death, his illness progressedincredibly quickly, just as mine had. He was also diagnosed only when it wasway too late. To support my mother, I spent as much time with him as I could,which gave me yet more opportunities to find out about my earlier life.
As summer turned to spring and he got better, we began toenjoy more and more family occasions. Sundays alternated between them coming tous for lunch and vice versa. Dad was also very much a pub man, and we startedgoing out for a drink regularly, when he would sit in the pub and puff away tohis heart’s content.
This was before the smoking ban, and sometimes we werejoined by my uncle Bill, who liked nothing better than to sit on a bar stool,filling the air with the smoke from his pipe.
Perhaps it was just as well that Dad had passed away when hehad, as one of his major gripes was the government’s plans to introduce asmoking ban in pubs. He considered this to be an infringement of his civilliberties.
When I’d died in 2025 there had only been Stacey left andI’d only seen her at weekends. It had been a lonely time but my journey backthrough time had now delivered me a wife, a mother and a father.
With my family around me, I felt quite content, and if Icould have stayed in that moment and gone back no further, I’d have beenperfectly happy.
But time continued to march backwards, with me no more ableto do anything about it than a normal person moving in the other direction. Asit did so, I was watching Stacey growing younger before my eyes.
She may have been the one who had been with me the longest,but I was more than aware that she would also be the first one whom I wouldlose.
July 2005
I had made a decision long ago not to get involved in eventsoutside of my immediate friends and family.
I knew that I could change things after the fire at thefurniture store all those years in the future, but I was reluctant to intervenein other events. The news was regularly filled with stories of death anddisaster, some of which could be prevented, some which couldn’t.
If I’d tried to prevent every car crash, murder or terroristoutrage, I would never have found time to do anything else.
Occasionally the idea of being a time-travelling detective,preventing crimes before they were committed, appealed, but was there reallyany point? And what right did I have to play God anyway? How would I choose wholived or died?
If a teenager got killed because he got into a car driven bya joyriding mate, would it be alright to let him die because I was busy withsome other more worthy cause at the other end of town?
I didn’t want to shoulder the responsibility of suchdecisions, so the vast majority of the time I allowed the world to play out asit was destined to.
However, in July 2005, I decided that I would make anexception to this rule. The first
