The Time Travel Mission to a Rum Shop

There’s a prank I would love to play sometime. I’d rush into a rum shop somewhere in the Barbados, act as if I'm out of breath and ask a group of rum drinkers “What’s today’s date?”.

When someone answers I’ll then say frantically, “No I mean the year. What’s the year, man?”

After the inevitable confused looks, someone would confirm the year, at which point I’d say something like, “2018. Then it worked. The time machine took me all the way back to 2018. Bahahahahahahaha!”

Then I’d spend some time trying to convince those drunkards that I’m an agent of the Temporal Division of the Barbados Defence Force from the year 2250 and I’m on a mission to make sure they stay at that rum shop as long as possible because the future depends on it. Over many drinks.

Don't they look like they're waiting for a good time travel story?

I would get a frigging kick out of that.

The problem is Barbados is too small and a more likely scenario is that one of the drunkards would say something like “Beckles, yuh shite. I went to primary school with you. You don’t remember me? Temporal division my ass. Look come and drink something and stop talking a barrifle of…” And then he’d string together a series of curse words in a manner that’s unique to Bajans.

Barbados is too small. Just this week a workmate related a story of her Akita getting into an altercation with what she described as the biggest, blackest cat she’d ever seen.

I think Biggest Blackest Cat could also be the nickname of my primary school friend Llamar.

Llamar AKA Biggest, Blackest Cat. No photo found

Anyway she took her dog to a vet to see after some damage it suffered in the altercation and mentioned that the vet should be on the look out for a large, black cat with Akita shaped injuries. The vet chuckled and led her to another room where the cat was lying, sedated and stitched up. The vet then revealed that it was his cat.

Barbados is too small.

I’ve also experienced instances where I found that the world is too small.

Once in my first year at university in Montreal, I was sitting in a bus that was stopped at a traffic light. While there, the driver opened the door to chat with a young lady standing on the sidewalk. When the light changed, the driver continued chatting for perhaps another 15 seconds before I heard a voice from behind me yelling, “Man look, guh long wid de rassole bus.” The voice of another random Bajan in the middle of major metropolitan city.

That encounter made this somewhat homesick Bajan smile and realise that the world can be smaller than you may think.

But it only now occurs to me that the perfect place for me to play the time traveller prank would have been Montreal. Where few people knew me.

Beckles, you really are a shite.