(I know Woolworth’s still exists in an online format but this is not how I’m used to it or have grown up with!)

I personally think we’re facing the end of the traditional High Street as we know it.  More and more people are making their purchases online and understandably so as it’s often cheaper.  I’m guilty of it too – I’ll find an item I’m interested in in a High Street store and then return home and search online to determine where I can purchase it at the cheapest price (or I’ve even been known to ‘surf the Net’ outside a store on my smartphone) .  Often it’s cheaper online than in a store.

The more of us that do this then the more stores we will see closing.

Will there be a High Street in the future?  Maybe, but not as we currently recognise it.

What I will miss, and that the Internet cannot replace, is the ability to physically see, touch, and try an item prior to purchasing it.

However, we’ve probably already passed the point of no return?  The High Street’s demise is inevitable as our continued technological evolution rolls unstoppably onward.

We’ll miss ‘going to the shops’ but much too late to do anything about it.  Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Again, we’ll become all the more reclusive and sedentary as our lives are spent in voluntary solitary confinement inside our own homes venturing ‘outside’ only through the electronic medium of the all-invasive Internet!

I’ve got to thinking recently of something that never seems to have been considered regarding time travel: it cannot successfully take place without space travel.

If you were to travel in time from where you are now, whether forward or backward, you will more than likely materialise in an empty part of space.

The planet Earth does not remain in a fixed location in the Universe but is travelling through space in orbit around our Sun. This orbit will fluctuate so the position it occupies in space at this moment in time will not be precisely the same coordinates it will occupy twelve months from now. Gravitational forces, etc. will affect this orbit and modify the Earth’s flight through space.

Therefore any attempt to move through time to appear in the same position on the planet must go hand in hand with the ability to predict where that location is in space at the required point in time and to be able to travel to that position.

Whilst it’s not a flight of fancy to imagine a space vehicle capable of the required movement in space it takes a stretch of the imagination to imagine the computational power that would be required in order to determine with the required level of accuracy any particular point on the planet’s surface spatial coordinates at any given time.

Any imperfection in this computational accuracy could result in your materialisation in empty space, if you’re lucky, but inside the planet if you are not!

Thus although the subject of time travel has resulted in some imaginative movies the likelihood of performing it successfully and safely is so remote as to probably remain the stuff of fiction.

See Wikipedia’s pages for further information regarding: Lesney and Matchbox.

More information can be found at Wikipedia’s Tom & Jerry page.

There appears to be a website devoted to the sweets of yesteryear: http://www.aquarterof.co.uk/