Cheating death

2016 was probably the year even the most optimistic of us — those who can genuinely square the new populist politics with a bright future for truth-seekers, scientists and rational thinkers — gave up on the possibility of time travel.

Surely, on every rally stage there should have been at least one white man from the future (it’s generally a white man for the simple statistical reason that if you’re a woman or a non-white man and go travelling in time, there’s only about 0.2 per cent of recorded history where you won’t materialise to immediate shouts of, ‘Quick, Paw, fetch the best whupping switch — and a cage’), wild-eyed, oddly dressed, raising up his ray gun to erase the crazed possibility of the Leader of the Free World… well, you know the rest.

So. Either time travel can’t happen or we’re all going up in a nuclear holocaust before we get round to inventing it.