I have been traveling a lot recently.
A colleague and I have done 9 countries on 4 continents in 31 days. In fact, if we can manage to arrange a workshop somewhere in Antarctica in the next month we will each win a set of kitchen knives and a commendation from The Royal Geographic Society.
One of the interesting side effects of all this travel was that my hair - odd at the best of times - had become unruly and ill mannered and so I found myself in a barber's chair with my hairdresser, Ian.
Now Ian is a skinny Mancunian with an earnest desire to become a photographer, a deft pair of scissors and an interesting line in patter honed on the back streets of Salford.
But on this particular day, he was also sporting a magnificent black eye partially obscured by the liberal application of concealer. Obviously, this shiner became the first point of conversation.
Apparently Ian had been wandering home in Camden after a couple of pints and was accosted by a young gentleman of that environs.
"Gizza f@*king ***" implored said youth. Ian ignored him at his cost as a healthy blow landed just under his eye. No warning, no delay, just wallop.
Now as I said, Ian is a skinny mite of a lad. In fact he makes me look like a rippling mountain of finely tuned man-muscle but I happen to know he is a pro-level kick boxer.
Sure enough, he did make the lad pay for his rudeness, grabbing his hoodie and pulling him forward onto a supremely angled Doctor Marten. Hostilities ended and each went on their way.
But it left a question hanging - why, when Ian is such a fighter and a Man City supporter into the bargain, why did he get caught with a punch?
And here is where the conversation got interesting. Ian had been at a mate's house and they had watched a bootleg dvd of a lecture given by some crazy Swedish bloke about extra terrestrials and the evidence for them living amongst us today.
And he began to reel off examples culminating in a excoriating polemic against a certain hairdressing impressario who fit the Swedish Theory so perfectly that Ian expected Gillian Anderson to be popping round to his house that later evening.
But why did that lead to a punch? Did Ian believe the hoodie came from elsewhere? No, not at all. He had just been so buried in thought remembering the books he had read as a kid, written by Erich von Daniken in the late seventies, that he hadn't been concentrating.
Now if you haven't heard of this bloke and his ideas, Google him and check it out. From the Nazca Lines to Chichen Itza to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, this guy had some interesting hypotheses.
Ian and I discussed them and took them to another dimension. What if they were not extra terrestrial but were from earth but in the future?
Would the same stuff have been created? For example, anyone today knows man can fly, we are all taught basic geometry at school and we all know how to magnify a scale drawing to a 3-d imprint on a grand scale using theodolytes and a protractor (don't we?).
So Ian and I could have gone back in time and made those giant spiders and that chalk man with the enormous willy and we could have done it as a prank.
And that got me thinking: imagine if we could use time travel as marketeers to go and tamper with people's minds, what would we do? I, for one, would go back and change the formative experiences of today's thirty to forty year olds so they were more likely to buy my brands now.
And when you think like that you can see why it is a sensitive topic, advertising to the young, and you can absolutley understand why this government is so set against the use of time travel in marketing campaigns.
