When Derek gets drunk his IQ rises. It doubles. According to Derek his IQ reaches towards infinity just before he passes out.

This, as the rationale for using highly advanced technology, such as Time Travel, to go on a Pub Crawl in the 1980s escapes me. Derek says this is because I am, functionally, an idiot. I was, understandably, offended at the dismissal of my intellect. I had, after all, been the one to have taught Derek the technical ins and outs of Time Travel. Derek did point out that my tutelage of him in Time Travel highlighted my idiocy.

I made a huge mistake.

In an inexplicable mist of invective, I shouted at Derek. The correct word, I screamed, is 'tutoring' not 'tutelage'. Derek was calm. Derek said it was a near homophonic paronomasia. When I looked blank Derek expanded. A pun that sounds a bit like the intended word. Since I had screamed 'tutoring', I had clearly understood the joke. Derek pointed at my blank expression and reiterated that I am, functionally, an idiot. Derek muttered, homophobic paranoia and I continued to look blank.

My huge mistake was this: I said, big words are not really helping, Derek.

Did I ever mention that Derek is Six Foot Three in bare feet: that translates to One Hundred And Ninety And A Half Centimetres in metric bare feet. That height usually makes him intimidating. Which is a problem if you do not want to be intimidated. On balance, Derek finds it hard to intimidate people with eye contact. Bending down gives him a comic Punchinello appearance. Having persuaded him to wear a plague doctor's mask, once, Derek has never quite decided how he felt about the image. Derek rarely walks around bare foot.

Inside the Punch Tavern in Fleet Street in 1985, Derek was disappointed to find it was named after Mister Punch of Punch Magazine. Derek had discovered the Punch Tavern through "City of London Pubs: A Practical and Historical Guide", published 1973, by Timothy Richards and James Stevens Curl. This was, of course, a distraction from his promenade from place to place in Leeds. Derek managed to sit in a corner of the Punch Tavern and watch the Punch and Judy College of Professors form. Which, everybody suspects, is merely a beard for domestic violence. Derek, naturally, departed from 1985 to May 9th 1662. Covent Garden. Pollicinella, Derek informed me, was performed there for the first time in History.

I made a huge mistake.

I asked Derek what he did for money when he arrived, May 9th 1662. He smiled. Apparently it was easy to obtain quite a number of King Charles Silver Crowns for only a few bottles of Supermarket Vodka. Even more useful, people from 1662 could never tell if the amnesia was due to some obscure ontological stability process protecting the temporal streams from the contradiction of getting drunk with alcohol more than three hundred years before it was distilled or because 96% Spirit does that. When explaining this, it suddenly occurred to Derek that he really could have gone to 1662 and invested in a bit of land funded from a single evening of drunken debauchery and gambling.

My huge mistake was this: I said, you need to keep your temporal footprint discreet, Derek.

As huge mistakes go, this was far larger than it might seem. Derek calculated that his peak IQ occurred when he added five hundred grammes of alcohol to his body. Which, Derek calculated, would be eliminated from his body in about thirty eight years at normal metabolic rates. Derek would imbibe, be a genius, solve the mugging, travel thirty eight years into the future and be sober, without losing consciousness. With a flourish, Derek announced that "Red Cell and Plasma Volumes in Normal Adults", Hurley, P.J., 1975: Jour. of Nuc. Med. Jan. 1975, 16 (1) 46-52; would back him up. Citations always look better after a few drinks.

I do keep mentioning that Derek is not bright.

Derek reached an unnamed number of grammes of alcohol and passed out. Time Travel is not a designated driver. Time Travel is not a therapy for lushes. What Derek had failed to understand was that the thirty eight years would be thirty eight years of his personal time line. That thirty eight years being theoretic since alcohol reaches toxicity at about 0.5% Blood Alcohol Content. Time Travel would not be helping Derek. The obvious revelation: the alcohol had been added by the Fourteen Stations Of The Crass Pub Crawl and unconsciousness had been reached by the end of the Pub Crawl.

Had Derek been paying attention, he would have realised that all he needed to do was to look at the date, thirty eight years into the future, to work out which Pub he passed out in. That would then let him know who mugged him. Getting drunk, as a Forensic Method for Temporal Detectives seems to be much overlooked. Derek was going to wake up, with a sore head, at one of fourteen dates between Sunday the Fifth of May 2018 and Tuesday the Third of January 2023. Those dates could only be a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Derek had percentages worked out. Charts. Detailed plans of action from his peak IQ calculations.

Derek woke up on a Thursday.

Derek Gives Up On Time Travel: The Thickening Of The Plot.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It All Became Tense.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It Unravelled.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It Got All Complicated.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It All Began.