The Time Traveller ( Time Tunnel Tale #1)

Frank Scott shambled down Sauchiehall Street, it was Friday night, and he had been for a few drinks after work, the traditional ‘Friday Pint’ thing had changed since the Covid pandemic, and few of his colleagues liked to partake of the old ‘amber nectar,’ as they once had.

He did not care, he had always been a bit of a loner, liked his own company.

There were just a handful of people in The Beresford, his regular haunt.

Solitary drinking old guys like him, slumped over pints of lager, with Grouse whisky as a chaser, celebrating the end of another working week, and one week nearer retiral.

He wondered if his younger colleagues just did not like associating with an older guy, he was after all fifty-nine, old enough to be their father or uncle, and wasn’t that the same age Iain Banks had died at?

Frank was an aspiring author and was a major fan of the works of Iain Banks, he even looked a wee bit like him, albeit with a lot less hair, however, aside from that, the resemblance was certainly uncanny. His work clothes, like him, had seen better days, and his ID lanyard displayed an aged photo that on closer inspection, could have been a younger relation of his, a son, or brother, but was a younger, more vital Frank, the lad he had been, many moons ago, back in the day , as he often said.

Frank had been a civil servant for 40 years and as he shambled drunkenly along Sauchiehall, he recalled the glory days of the ‘eighties when he came here on training courses, when Glasgow and the world were hugely different places from the dystopia it had become. Frank liked Glasgow, a lot of the non sci-fi authors he admired wrote about the place. The works of William McIllvanney, James Kelman and Alasdair Gray had all been influential on Frank's early scribblings, his attempts at writing what he thought to be a real working class story, had come from those early influences, and he had moved on from realism to sci-fi, in the attempt to escape the  humdrum, hamster wheel existence of his daily grind.

Back then, the plethora of nightclubs and bars lining the city’s main street was second to none, you could drink in all the bars and still have change for a fish and chip supper at the end of the night, it was much better than places like Aberdeen or Dundee where he had also worked in his time in the service, as the slogan of the times had said , Glasgow was indeed ‘miles better’, he remembered the smiley face logo, what was now called an ‘emoji’. He liked drinking in the Griffin, and the White Horse, which he vaguely recalled Banks had referenced in his ‘Espedair Street’ novel, back in the mists of time, which to Frank gave it ‘street credibility,’ as he was wont to say back in the ‘eighties.

But that was all gone, since the pandemic, Glasgow and all the cities were full of empty shops, or retail units ‘for lease -may sell’ as the advertisement bills proclaimed ,  full of homeless folk bedding down for the night, and part of the day, it was ‘nae real’, a bit like some of the sci-fi stories that Frank liked, and tried to emulate in his amateur author guise.

Frank was currently working on his ‘Covidiary’ a pun on the words ‘Covid,’ and ‘Diary’ amalgamated, this was his documentation on how life had changed since Covid hit the world.

Frank had written on his website , that his literary influences were Michael Moorcock , Iain M. Banks, and M. John Harrison, in his opinion, the best three  sci-fi/fantasy/ speculative fiction authors, and those who had influenced his own fiction in a big way: especially his dystopian fantasy entitled ‘The Sniper’, set in a future version of Aberdeen, which (he thought) owed a big debt to Harrison’s Viriconium.  His quartet of Kindle books were published on Amazon and featured a time travelling protagonist who travelled through times past and present, from his lifetime in the 1980s, not surprisingly set in a thinly disguised version of Glasgow. The character of ‘Johnny G,’ as he was called, owed a lot to Moorcock’s Oswald Bastable, a flamboyant time traveller, who in turn owed his existence to Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg, whom Frank recalled being played by the actor David Niven, back in the ‘seventies.

Lately Frank had not been getting on well at work, the odds were constantly stacked against him and everything he seemed to do was wrong.

The job seemed to change on a weekly basis, as it had in 2020, the year of the pandemic, and nothing had let up.

The thought of retirement and getting the fabled service pension was one that appealed to Frank big time. He could give it all up and become a writer, fulfil his ambition, the one he had held onto through 40 years of stress.

If he were honest, he would much rather have been remembered as a writer than as a failed civil servant, it would look better on his gravestone.

He would have a look at the Covidiary once he got home, a couple of black coffees would sober him up, a chip supper also would help soak up the alcohol, then he would work on his magnum opus!

Later he would watch some of his old sci-fi  DVDs, like ‘2001- A Space Odyssey’, ‘Blade Runner,’ or some ‘70s TV series he liked, Dr Who and ‘Timeslip’ came to mind. He liked a bit of fictional time travel, imagine if you could really travel in time, like the kids in ‘Timeslip’ or Dr Who in the Tardis?

Imagine if you could, he thought to himself.

Just up ahead was a bar or nightclub he had not seen before further up Sauchiehall Street, where he recalled somewhere called ‘Shenanigans’ had been in the ‘eighties. The ‘Time Tunnel,’ it was called, the music emanating from it was very ‘eighties, synthesizer driven pop, what then was seen as futuristic, but what was now seen as ‘retro.’ He fancied another drink, just one for the road, as the multitude of singers from yesteryear had crooned. He would have another whisky and get off home.

Once in the ‘Time Tunnel, there was hardly anyone there, maybe folk were still worried about Covid. ’ he bought a whisky, and downed it in one, his vision blurred, and he was momentarily in a trance like state.

What? Had he been drugged? Was he dreaming?

 Frank came to in a vastly different place, no synthesiser music was in evidence, this had been replaced by machine-gun fire, and the sounds of explosions, the sounds of battle.

He was in a war zone, it was as if he had gone back, that is travelled back in time, like the characters in his stories. Strangely, he seemed to have sobered up, and was laughing inwardly, at his predicament, his visiting a bar called the ‘Time Tunnel,’ which proved to be exactly that.