Hiding Dominic

Ah. At last, the 1980's cult classic 'The Flipside of Dominic Hide' is available on dvd. Peter Firth plays Dominic, the eponymous hero, travelling back in time (the 'flipside') from 2130 back to the 1980's to study London's transport system, in days when you could still park for free behind Harrods after five o'clock and Uncle Ken hadn't introduced congestion charges and bendy buses. He falls in love and fathers a child with a girl called Jane (what else..). I was reminded of it seeing this image of an island off the coast of Guatemala that someone sent to me, the theme music to FSDH being entitled 'are there somewhere islands..' .
With the benefit of hindsight I would surely be able to make much more sense of 1850's gadgetry than if I were to travel the same time period from now into the future. The unrelenting arrow, the diode of time, pushes us all inexorably forwards. What would Newton have made of mobile phones? Or Leonardo, laptops? Hemingway once wrote 'the past is a foreign country'. In which case, the future must be a parallel universe.