I have always fantasised about building a time machine but must admit that it is probably not feasible. However, I sometimes wonder why depth psychology hasn’t been commercialised in another way that never seems to have occurred to anyone.

Under analysis patients are routinely taken back to incidents in their past and made to relive them in order to clear up some deep-seated problem. Surely we could, for a suitable fee, be taken on trips into our own memories, to people and events we’d consciously forgotten all about, on a sort of magical mystery tour of our own minds and pasts. Everyone loves recalling the good old days of their carefree youth, first love and all the rest of it. These memories are vivid and still there, so accessing them on an industrial scale shouldn’t prove to be too difficult, especially if large amounts of money are involved.

I was just thinking today as a piece of music came on the radio that it reminded me of a certain Christmas, 1975 I believe it was, when my paternal grandma came to stay with us and at one point I put a Sibelius symphony, one of my presents, on the record player. Listening to the piece again today, the past just flooded over me and for a while I was actually back there, studying zoology in the year before uni, my bedroom vividly retrieved from the lumber-room of lost decades. And there must be so much more locked away in my mind and forgotten about, which it would be sheer joy to relive.

I can imagine the necessary equipment being cumbersome at first but then becoming much more portable, streamlined and even chic, like the development of mobile phones.

In old folks’ homes every resident could be fitted with the gear so that they could forget their present unbearable circumstances and instead be young and happy again, forever. Everyone would be able to go home.