Well, I’ve done a lot of reading and research, in my spare time (I was running short of cash, so I’ve had to do some paid work). But what I’ve found so far makes me think I’ve got a serious, serious problem. I’m not sure this is the same planet I left. There’s been a war in Iraq for a couple of years it seems. OK I was finishing my A-levels when it apparently started, and I know I was a bit self-centred in those days, but I think I’d have remembered that. And while there was a war in Afghanistan, it was nothing like what I remember watching on tele – we weren’t fighting the Russians, for one thing.

But so many other things are just as I expected them to be in 05 – I haven’t seen anything really about this country that strikes me as odd, or jarring (except for the missing Scottish Army camp, of course).

I don’t know if Project Hermes has somehow changed the past. Just sending me here has changed things (some bookmakers are now slightly poorer, for a start). But that wouldn’t explain the disappearance of a WWII army camp. Unless, of course, the earlier tests, with inanimate objects (I’m thinking of the very early tests, when things just disappeared) perhaps sent them back to the twentieth century, and really distorted things.

But what really scares me, is what if I haven’t been sent back into the past, but I’ve actually gone somewhere different (to a parallel universe?). Hermes certainly wasn’t about time travel, but about moving objects, so perhaps it has physically sent me somewhere else, and not, as I first thought, sent me back in time three years, leaving me spatially in the same place. Or maybe I am spatially in the same place, just shifted sideways by a dimension or four?

Probably I shouldn’t be writing any of this. I may be breaking the Official Secrets Act (but on which planet – and who’s going to prosecute me?). But I need to share my thoughts with someone, and who else can I turn to? If I’m right, then there’s no Project Hermes team on this planet, so the MOD won’t be interested. If I go to anyone in authority they’re just going to assume I’m a crackpot – at the best I’ll be slung out, and the worst, sectioned.

I did try putting Project Hermes into Google – and there is such a thing here, but it’s an EEC scheme, not what I was involved in at all (not that my Project Hermes would have had a website!).

So I reckon sharing my problems on the internet is the least of my worries, and, who knows, maybe someone out there will read this and be able to tell me what to do. It can’t do any harm to at least make a record of things.