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When I was a boy, going to Margate for the weekend was the best holiday you could hope for. Then people started going to Spain all the time. I never went there, but I know a lot of people who did. As air travel started becoming more affordable even the poorest of the poor were holidaying in New York City, Los Angeles Town and Florida Upon America.

It wasn't long before people got fed up of all that and started going to places like Thailand and Vietnam to find themselves or explore themselves or whatever they call it. The world had become too small, like an acorn or something. I thought it was only a matter of time before people started travelling to the deepest parts of the ocean. By Christ I was wrong about that one.

I needed to get in on the whole travelling scene. There was money to be made and if anyone should have been making it, it should have been me. I hadn't even been to Spain, for Christ's sake!

I thought the best place I could get people to explore themselves was inside their own bodies. "Forget Chile!" I said. "I can shrink you down, put you in a pill and put you inside yourself for two weeks of soul searching and bowel perching." That was my slogan. People couldn't understand how I could shrink them down and put them inside their own bodies, so they automatically thought it was a scam. It wasn't even that complicated, but people are idiots.

So I came up with another venture; explore someone else. I'd shrink them down, put them in a pill and they could explore their friends, family or even a celebrity. That didn't last long. After the first wave of law suits I was losing £5000 on every customer. Shrinking was an expensive procedure, so I came up with another plan, one where the costs were low; parallel universes.

"How much can you really know about yourself if you've never travelled to a parallel universe and lived the life of your parallel self?" I'd cry. A parallel universe, for crying out loud! It made Disneyland look like a block of flats in Chepstow.

It was a very good idea. I didn't even know how to send anyone to a parallel universe. I'd just bring them into my office and explain that there was every chance that when they got to the other universe everything would be almost exactly the same. I'd knock them out with a futuristic looking drug gun and when they awoke in my office I'd be wearing a fake beard. I'd tell them that our universes were so alike that their other self had come and booked the parallel holiday at the exact same time, so their friends and families probably wouldn't even notice the difference. So for two weeks they'd carry on going to work as normal thinking that they were on holiday in another dimension and then come back to my office. Then I'd knock them out again, take off my beard and when they awoke I'd charge them £5,000.

It was very popular amongst gap year students. The best part is that sometimes I'd get whole families doing it and that would be their holiday for the year, living their normal bloody life. The suckers.


Phil, Newcastle.