It is Back to the Future Day (raptuous applause and cheering from my readers). And what is « Back To The Future Day » ?

Well, rather than me taking ages to explain it, here is a short passage that I purloigned from the CNN website.

(CNN)”Back to the Future” Day has finally arrived.

« In “Back to the Future Part II,” Marty McFly travels to October 21, 2015, to save his children, yet to be born in “Back to the Future’s” 1985.

The plot gets tangled — by fixing one thing, McFly and Doc Brown (and the villainous Biff Tannen) create a number of new messes — but what remains is the film’s vision of a year that was still more than a quarter-century away when the movie was shot and released in 1989. The entire trilogy is even being rereleased Wednesday, so you can see for yourself. »

October 21st 2015 – there will only ever be one and hence this will be the only ever Back To The Future Day in the whole of World History. Is this really worth celebrating though ?

This morning’s very serious BBC radio news programme – « Today » ran a short « technological » report on the event : had any of the technology portrayed in a 1989 film about the year 2015, actually become a reality ? NO.

Other media pundits have been asking various complex and thought-provoking questions such as : « Would you travel back to the future to save your children ? » or « If you could travel back in time to change your life, would you do it and what would you change, »

In answer to the first question YES and in answer to the second I DON’T KNOW.

Of course those tedious morning phone in programmes have all been asking the question « Where were you thirty years ago ? »

Well … I was a first year student at the (now defunct) City of London Polytechnic in London’s Whitechapel Road. I was on the Modular Studies Degree Course, majoring in French. Modular studies was simply a posh name for studying a little bit of everything because there was no one subject in which you really excelled.

I was going out with Carole, a French girl who was studying in Lancaster in the north of England, which meant a long bus journey north every weekend for sex. We eventually split up in September 1986.

In October 1985, I met Steph, Helen and Alex, who became my friends for life, and I spent a lot of time in pubs, drinking with fellow would-be student philosophers and politicians, working out ways to change the world without having to stray too far from the bar, unless it was to go to the toilet or wander out the pub and buy a kebab.

I guess was just normal.

And you know what, I’ve never seen Back to the Future II.