In the months I spent in the dungeons, as I said, I had time to think.

I believe there are several possible explanations for what is happening to me, and I’ve tried to work through them logically:

1. Whatever happened to me, when the team sent me that first time, I didn’t actually go anywhere. What did change affected my brain, so what I think I’ve been experiencing for the last couple of years hasn’t actually happened. I’m in an hallucination. My body, presumably, is still at the base in Norfolk. If that’s the case, there’s nothing I can do to change things, so I might as well ignore that option.

2. Hermes certainly wasn’t about time travel, but about moving objects, but I appear – at first sight – to have travelled in time (jumping both backwards and forwards – but interestingly never up to my own time, 2008, and certainly not ahead of that). However, the past I have landed in has been subtly different to the one I can remember from the history books.

The version of Earth I’m in now appears to be 2007, but it’s got very many differences from the way of life that I remember from my last year in Norwich.

So either Hermes has changed the past in some way – either from what I’ve done (or may be going to do, if my next sending sends me even further back into the past) or the effect of the objects they sent before they moved on to human guinea pigs – or else time travel isn’t what’s happening here.

3. As I say, Hermes was a project to move things around physically. So perhaps that’s what’s happened – it has physically sent me somewhere else. That somewhere, though, isn’t on the Earth I know, but in some kind of parallel Earth; maybe I am spatially in the same place, just shifted sideways by a dimension or three?

In fact, then, it’s not just one parallel Earth, but a whole series of them, each time that I send.

Presumably history has developed differently on each version, so that I haven’t really been travelling into the past at all, merely to an Earth that hasn’t developed as fast, or in the same way. That would explain why, now, for instance, is so different to the 2007 that I remember.

I can understand some versions of Earth still being in the Middle Ages – and I didn’t have a calendar then to look at then, so although they may have had medieval civilisation/ technology, perhaps the actual date was the 21st Century. But twice I’ve arrived at places that are almost contemporary with my Earth – and the years I was in were 2005 and, now, 2007. Why is that?
Why not 2008? Or 2010, which it presumably is by now, back at base?

When I was in prison, I’m sure I came up with four options, but I can’t remember what the fourth one was. I’ve been racking my brains, and I can sense there was some brilliant idea there, but for the life of me I can’t bring it back.

Well, at least I’ve got this record now, of three possibilities.

How it helps me get back home, I’m not sure.