It’s often assumed that a time-traveller would be uniquely placed to profit from their knowledge of events, things that to them were historical but to their new contemporaries would be yet to occur, investing in little-known technologies that were destined for greatness, or remaining aloof from ill-fated fashions. But what about the other qualities one needs to do well? What about character, or luck?

A man sits at a corner table in the company of nothing but his thoughts and a third gin: his downcast eyes are looking beyond the tabletop and his lips twitch as he rehearses the choices that led him to his present position. Arriving in what was to him then history, he found himself more informed than his peers on almost every area of human endeavour: paralysed by the choices available to him, he invested his efforts in a reckless and haphazard manner, investing money in this new technology, travelling to that soon-to-be-pivotal region of the world, advising influential individuals to take advantage of the other recent development. Spreading his resources so broadly prevented him nurturing any one of his enterprises as they deserved, and soon he became aware of his reputation as a dilletante and shyster, a diverting accquaintance with an uncanny knack of guessing how things might fall out, but not one you would wish to have as a partner. Now you see him desparate and confused, at a loss to explain how he has squandered the best possible advantage a man might want in the world.

(It doesn’t end badly for our friend, by the way: he discovers that relinquishing the idea that he has a special advantage allows him to behave in a calmer and more trustworthy way, and by the end of his life he sometimes smiles to think that the distinction he is most proud of is no longer his time-traveller status but his champion carrot cake).

Knowing things that other people don’t yet is all very well, but it wouldn’t do on its own: you’d still need something like character to succeed, and that’s timeless.

I’m reading a review of Nordhaus’ book on the economics of various policy responses to global warming by Freeman Dyson, and it’s making me wonder, what did other civilisations on the brink of collapse say about their future? Are there Cambodian editorials somewhere, making passing comments like “of course, not having any food or money to defend ourselves against aggressive neighbours is difficult, but we are confident new irrigation and metallurgy technology will address these, and building Angkor Wat will show our empire continues to rise unchallenged“? Or stones from Greenland saying “we’ll never need to learn to hunt like the Inuit because we’ll have so much trade going on any day now”? How many people have spent time writing “well, anyway, something will turn up and it’ll be alright” shortly before being proved wrong? I’d love to read them.

The problem with saying “something will turn up – it usually does” is that you’re not working from a complete sample: the only cases we know about are the ones where something did turn up. We don’t hear about all the times something failed to turn up. There might be just as many of them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, recently. More specifically, about how we perceive it, and relate to it, and talk about it, and I’ve been wondering if we wouldn’t benefit from having more ways of making it visible. I don’t mean just ways of representing it passing: clocks are good at that, and there are plenty of ways the passage of time reveals itself that are transparent. Rather, I’ve been thinking about how to make the implicit passage of time explicit, to break something that seems temporally static into pieces that make it clear to us that time was passing when it happened, whether that stasis in time appears to us because something is instantaneous or because it seems to persist as part of our surroundings, the context in which temporally more active things happen.

From one of our meeting rooms you can see some trees standing in the flagstones outside the old IMAX building. The trees are young, with a slim trunk and a clear head of leaves on top, like a child’s drawing: the leaves are large and well defined, and if the sun shines brightly enough the trees cast clear shadows. I was struck, recently, by the indissoluble link between the tree and the shadow, and thought how satisfying it would be to be hold the shadow in place as the sun moved slowly round, breaking that link. As the shadows of the other trees crept across the flagstones, the discrepancy between them and the one shackled in place would become more visible: the angle between them would tell you how long it had been held in place.

Not literally possible, of course, and probably for the best. But I thought perhaps there might be a way to mimic this, to fix the shadow on the ground somehow so that it would be clear that wherever the shadow might be at present, at some point in history it had been elsewhere. You can get hold of photosensitive paper fairly easily, I think, but I wanted something that would act faster than paper. At the moment, I’m thinking about evaporation. I want to find some kind of mixture that would stain the ground at about the same rate that it evaporates, so that all you have to do to fix a shadow would be to spill this fluid over it and wait. If the sun was particularly strong that day, the shadow would be sharp and defined: if it was cloudy, or windy perhaps, it would be blurry and indistinct. The shadow would tell you not just that time had passed but also something about the weather: from a shape on the ground you could read the history of the sky.

The thing I like most about this idea is that you could make pictures by fixing overlapping shadows, if you had an object with the right shape in the way of the sun. I’d love to hand out vials of this shadow fixing elixir with a picture and GPS co-ordinates: from the angle of the shadows in the picture you’d have to work out when to pour the liquid on the ground in order to reproduce it. Or perhaps you’d just have a set of times and a location, and when you stepped back from the shadows you’d fixed over the course of the morning, a message would reveal itself. Lots of games. But in all of them, you’d have to think about the relationship between time and the world, and when you see it and when you don’t, and that would be, I think, a good thing.

How to move away from the turgid and despicable tolerance of mental sluggishness and egotistic long-windedness that characterises the workshop? The fatal blow to the agenda occasioned by alloting only a couple of minutes for each attendee to share their name and affiliation must be dodged; the intake of breath and ceiling-bound gaze that signals the beginning of a professional history too important to be abridged must be stillborn; the puzzled frown that proceeds a comment, really, not a question must be stripped from the brow that carries it.

There is no “before we begin”. We have already begun.

We offer a manifesto for a revolution, an uprising to sweep intellectual torpor from those gatherings that hold influence, a revolt to bring to power those with blood in their veins and fire in their synapses:

1. Nobody in attendance over 30, or lacking possession of the hunger that comes before seniority and respect have taken hold.
2. On entering, all in attendance to state honestly that they have read what they were expected to read: those that cannot to wear a token indicating so, in order that their fellows might judge what they say accordingly.
3. No more venues that speak of success and privilege, that flatter those that attend they exist in an echelon apart from the common mass. Places that energise and dare the senses should be our only residence: the edges of clifftops; the roofs of speeding trains; the engine room of a crippled submarine; a palace of ice that will melt within an hour.
4. Every one attending to look within themselves when they find nothing ready to say: if nothing appears, or if they think more about the other participants than the task at hand, or if they discover themselves saving insight for more amenable company, they should bow quietly and leave.

Talking this way will be glorious! Talking this way will be fast, correct and free of ego! Talking like this will be electrodynamic!

In the UK again. What to write? Everything was splendid, apart from leaving. Being back will probably improve with time. Looking forward to the snow tomorrow and folding washing in the warm.