OK, where did I get to? Right. I really don’t need to be writing this, but it’s good just to get my fingers going again, and to do some writing, as this survivalist lark is making my thinking process atrophy I think. Actually, I’m not thinking much, that’s the problem.

Anyway, back to my report of life at Mercury House.

Well, as best as I can gather, the scientists eventually moved on from sending inanimate objects, to see if they could do it to living beings. Obviously, they’d put the solid objects they’d been sending to all sorts of tests, to make sure as well as they could that the things they sent were the same as the things received, and they seemed satisfied.

Now obviously, they didn’t want to tell us human guinea pigs what happened to the early real guinea pigs they sent, but I gather there were a number of failures, before eventually they did manage to complete a number of sendings that their subjects survived. Apparently they were perfectly healthy, and as far as every test (down to DNA) could say, they were the same animals that had been sent.

So, the next stage was to be humans. And being a military project, they’d picked three soldiers to send. Tom and Kate are both REME sergeants, and I think the theory was that they would be able to give a better technical report of what happened. Me? I’m a lieutenant in the Norfolk Regiment – we were responsible for base security, and I’d been brought into the team when they wanted someone to lead the first mission – not that we really thought that the three of us being sent five miles from Mercury House to the receiving point in the grounds of the camp in rural Norfolk needed much leading.

So what happened? Well, I don’t know, is the pathetic answer. We stood in a wire-mesh cage. The top boffin pushed a button, and I passed out. When I came to, I was in a park, in Norwich, but not quite the Norwich I knew, and one that was three years behind the one I’d left. There was no sign of Tom or Kate. My guess - and I hope I'm wrong - is that the process didn't work perfectly for them.

I’m getting choked up. Going to stop writing and post this, before I say something I might regret.