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By Root 444 0

noise like a dog barking, and they said, “Watch where the hell you're going,” but I pretended that they were just one of the Guarding Demons in Train to London and there was a train. And I saw a man with a newspaper and a bag of golf clubs go up to one of the doors of the train and press a big button next to it and the doors were electronic and they slid open and I liked that. And then the doors closed behind him.

And then I looked at my watch and 3 minutes had gone past since I was at the ticket office, which meant that the train would be going in 2 minutes.

And then I went up to the door and I pressed the big button and the doors slid open and I stepped through the doors.

And I was on the train to London.

193. When I used to play with my train set I made a train timetable because I liked timetables. And I like timetables because I like to know when everything is going to happen.

And this was my timetable when I lived at home with Father and I thought that Mother was dead from a heart attack (this was the timetable for a Monday and also it is an approximation)

And at the weekend I make up my own timetable and I write it down on a piece of cardboard and I put it up on the wall. And it says things like Feed Toby or Do maths or Go to the shop to buy sweets. And that is one of the other reasons why I don't like France, because when people are on holiday they don't have a timetable and I had to get Mother and Father to tell me every morning exactly what we were going to do that day to make me feel better.

Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don't have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuit again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable time is not there like the landing and the garden and the route to school. Because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth going round the sun and atoms vibrating and clocks ticking and day and night and waking up and going to sleep, and it is like west or nor-nor-east, which won't exist when the earth stops existing and falls into the sun because it is only a relationship between the North Pole and the South Pole and everywhere else, like Mogadishu and Sunderland and Canberra.

And it isn't a fixed relationship like the relationship between our house and Mrs. Shears's house, or like the relationship between 7 and 865, but it depends on how fast you are going relative to a specific point. And if you go off in a spaceship and you travel near the speed of light, you may come back and find that all your family is dead and you are still young and it will be the future but your clock will say that you have only been away for a few days or months.

And because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, this means that we can only know about a fraction of the things that go on in the universe, like this

And this is a map of everything and everywhere, and the future is on the right and the past is on the left and the gradient of the line c is the speed of light, but we can't know about the things which happen in the shaded areas even though some of them have already happened, but when we get to f it will be possible to find out about things which happen in the lighter areas p and q.

And this means that time is a mystery, and not even a thing, and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is, exactly. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing.

And this is why I like timetables, because they make sure you don't get lost in time.

197. There were lots of people on the train, and I didn't like that, because I don't like lots of people I don't know and I hate it even more if I am stuck in a room with lots of people I don't know, and a train is like a room and you