Power Thinking, with Dr Morris O'Connor

Don’t regret your past: a peasant’s perspective.

IN 1754 the market town of Yate was a dire place to live. Unless you were rich you lived in dank, dark, cold wooden shacks. The days were spent wandering the forest, collecting wood to warm your undernourished frame. When you weren’t looking for sticks you were picking turnips out of a sodden field so you could raise enough money to buy a new pair of itchy trousers. I hated every minute of it and worst of all I had a dark secret that I couldn’t share with anyone. A secret that tormented me and kept me awake at night – what the would the 18th Century locals do to me if they found my iPhone?

Yes, I recently travelled back in time and not only did living conditions suck arse, I couldn’t even capitalise on any of the knowledge I had gained from living in the 21st Century. I actually don’t know how to make Coke from raw ingredients (boiling an egg, a walnut, some hair and a bit of tree bark comes close, but then you have the problem of the bubbles) so I couldn’t start a soft drinks company and make loads of money. Worse still, all the hot girls had really, really bad teeth so my advanced love making techniques were redundant.

Some of you may not believe time travel is possible, but why then, when I woke back up in 2011 was my wife Paew Pang sleeping at the other end of the bed? There is no other answer. I interrogated Paew Pang for an hour on my whereabouts and, revealingly, she was unable to answer me in English.

Whether I travelled back in time or not, who’s to say? You can’t prove I didn’t so don’t even try. But the experience of being a hard up, but handsome peasant with strong thighs provided an important life lesson. What you did in the past doesn’t matter. So many of us are held back by our previous actions and decisions. Whether we split up with the wrong woman, invested badly or drilled a peephole into a public toilet.

The past can be changed. Even if I somehow didn’t go back in time, other people are going to go soon and everything is going to get weird, and this could affect your relationships and small business ideas.

So don’t sit around and wait – change your life tomorrow, last week, or whatever bit of time you currently think you’re in.

Dr Morris O’Connor is the best selling author of Solve Your Problems Using a Time Machine.

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Former record shop staff at large in normal society

THE closure of record shops is exposing the general public to the borderline humans that worked in them, it has emerged.

The shops are becoming extinct as major labels like U2’s Mercury Records increasingly market their remaining CDs as big earrings or bird scarers, while vinyl has become the exclusive preserve of balding men who think Robert Elms is a modern lifestyle shaman.

But experts warn that ex-record shop staff will be unable to function in mainstream society.

Music industry analyst, Tom Logan, said: “After someone has worked in a record shop for more than five years, they become introverted, wary of females, develop unhygienic facial hair and have the general demeanour of a sexually frustrated dungeon master.

“These are not transferable skills.”

He added: “Without a counter to slouch behind, they are robbed of their power, like Nosferatu in daylight but with a stained Jesus and Mary Chain tour t-shirt from 1985 instead of a cloak.

“It’s only a matter of time before one of them does something hideous on public transport.”

Stephen Malley aka ‘Ape’, formerly head of pre-1979 progressive rock and Brazilian sex film soundtracks at Hackney’s Toad Records, said: “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me as I have an original mono pressing of Esoteric Wolf Dimension Inhabitor by the Disciples of Trung, with the embossed full colour sleeve in near mint or near mint minus condition, depending on which grading system you favour.

“And that is why it’s fine for me to lob my faeces at people while wandering around bus stations naked from the waist down.”

He added: “Some people have recommended that I experience something called ‘human female vagina’. But I’ve looked in the Record Collector price guide and it doesn’t seem to have a catalogue number.

“It can’t be that good anyway or I’d have heard it.”

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