'Finding the Tunnel & Strange Devices' - Time Tunnel # 6

Finding the Time Tunnel (1984)

(1) We arrived in Glasgow, just before 7pm, that would give us time to get our travel bags to the B&B, one of the ‘establishments’ we usually used for our training courses, ‘Smith’s Hotel’, on the less salubrious end of Sauchiehall Street, a nice place,  pretty basic, just what you needed.They served the Full Scottish Breakfast, which to me  was a real treat, something I never got at home.  The regular clientele at the place were lorry drivers, and travelling salesmen, mostly middle aged, from England, so sitting in the TV Room wasn’t a good idea. I usually stayed in my room, read or listened to my Walkman, and wrote what I considered to be poetry. That’s if I wasn’t in the pub with other trainees from the courses.  Gaz had phoned ahead, in office time, to book our rooms, he was more ‘au-fait’ with the arrangements than I was, so I left him to it. The plan was to go for a fish supper, or maybe chips and cheese, as they did down here, and then out for a few pints, in search of the bar Gaz had heard about, the ‘Time Tunnel’. Once we had eaten, in the ‘Ubiquitous Chip’, we walked a fair distance along Sauchiehall Street, into the Griffin for a couple of lagers, and across the street to the Beresford to check out the place, with its famous olde world Art Deco frontage, who knows maybe Frank Scott would be there!  We had heard of the Beresford from folk on courses but had never been inside. Gaz had McEwan's Export, and I had a nip of Grouse, with Coke, no ice.

“We were told that the ‘Time Tunnel’ was near here, up an alleyway, remember?” said Gaz

Sure enough, there was a gated lane, next to the Beresford, and a brightly lit doorway proclaimed’ The Time Tunnel’ – Doorway to the Future’. We walked towards the light, this looked like the bar, but was it really a passage through time?

The place looked okay, not really my scene, but what the hell. It was what I would have called a ‘theme bar’, the future and the impending millennium being the theme. The waitresses were dressed like characters from sci-fi movies, with short skirts, and pink hair which looked a little like the punk hairdos of a few years back, there was also a fat man stood behind the bar, a generic barman but for his silver boiler suit, which  he barely fit into. The music was futurist  synthesizer hell to my ears. Gaz actually liked a lot of this kind of thing, OMD, New Order, especially ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Soft Cell’, which was playing on the jukebox when we arrived , the extremely catchy ‘Tainted Love’, and the older German synthesiser music like Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream, which to my ears was ok, as their sound wasn’t a million miles from my fave band Hawkwind. Anyway, we approached the bar to see that the drinks were even themed on sci-fi movies, and ‘futuristic’ stuff. So here we were, what came next?

(2) ‘What Can This Strange Device Be?’(2021)

When we emerged from the ‘Time Tunnel, the bar, and the actual ‘tunnel’ itself, we had indeed travelled in time. This was the Dystopia, the 2020’s, crowds of people walked (marched) down Sauchiehall Street, which was still recognizable to us. The shop names had changed, some had closed down and were empty, and weeds were growing all over the place. The buildings still looked much the same, though a bit more weathered by time, and the elements.

Most of the people held a small device in their hands, I was momentarily reminded of the song by Rush from the 70s, where the singer asks ‘what this strange device can be? Some of them appeared to be talking into their device, like a ‘walkie-talkie’ radio, or a phone that was portable. They all seemed to be talking or shouting to or at someone, as they walked to work or whatever destination they sought. Some of the people wore headphones, some large and some small, maybe this was the millennial equivalent to a Sony Walkman.

I wasn’t about to ask anyone, as they all appeared stressed and preoccupied, maybe it was the conversations on their gadgets, or maybe like Gaz and me, they were constantly stressed out by tyrannical bosses in their workplaces.

Gone were the suits and ties we wore to work, everyone seemed to be dressed casually, jeans, leather jackets, open-necked shirts, mostly black, almost like a uniform. and every second person was tattooed, tastefully or otherwise. That’s some that you didn’t often see in 1984, when ex-servicemen, ex-cons, rock stars and bikers, seemed to be the people within my knowledge, that sported tattoos in our time.

One thing that was missing was folk going about with ‘jetpacks’, something we used to speak about when I was a kid back in the ‘60s, though I did see an object flying about that resembled a ‘radio-controlled aeroplane’, from our time, this, I was later to learn, was called a ‘drone’, and could do anything from taking photographs to firing guns.

We had to get back to the Beresford, to see if Frank Scott was there, he could be a potential source of help to us. I’m not sure if we wanted to be marooned in the Twenty First Century. The folk our age all looked the same, the same manner of dress, hairstyles, and faces with blank expressions, their fixation being on the screen of their small gadgets they all held onto for dear life, which I would later find out was called an ‘Android’, or an ‘I-Phone’. The former name caused Gaz to joke that he wondered if the former dreamed of electric sheep, but I dismissed that, thinking more of how the hell we would get back to 1984, or what if we stayed here. That would change our family history, wouldn’t it?

The two civil servants who took the day off for  trip to Glasgow in 1984, and never returned?

Time would tell, as someone more important than me once opined.