Derek had Indexed Ledgers.Those vintage books that Accountants used in the 1850s. Alphabetically listed is every Pub that Derek has ever had a drink in. It is, quite literally, the most tedious thing you could ever read. There are fifty two volumes, each of 520 pages. Each page with six columns. Each column neatly filled in. The Name of the Pub, the date and a fairly long number. Usually about twenty or so digits long.
Surely, I said, this would be the best place to find your 1980s Leeds Pub Crawl. Derek was disparaging. Derek, disparaging, is something like, simultaneously: being held down; being shouted at; being threatened with a four pound lump hammer; and, being licked on the face. Derek has never worked out the difference between disparaging and intimidation.
Derek stored his pub crawl Ledgers in a safe. When I asked about locking a pub crawl up in a safe, Derek became shifty. Not that he was good at being shifty. The conversation went something like this: you keeping your pub crawl safe; I have no idea what you mean; the ledger in the safe; oh my pass phrase ledger.
Which is how Derek explained that the entry "04. 1983. 10. 06. The Eldon. 892,605,777,684,200,300" was a pass phrase for encryption of a non fungible token for Time Travellers and the "892,605,777,684,200,300" was the number of centuries it would take to crack the encryption at about ten thousand guesses per second. Derek was proud of thinking ahead. Making sure it took longer than the age of the universe to decrypt meant this was actually secure encryption for Time Travellers.
You need secure encyption. If it takes longer than the lifetime of the Universe to decrypt then claiming it is secure might even be correct.
Derek proudly pointed out that the prime factors of the number of centuries taken to crack the pass phrase "04. 1983. 10. 06. The Eldon." are two, five, seven, seventy one, one hundred and one, four thousand five hundred and ninety seven and five million five hundred and twenty five thousand nine hundred and eighty one. Derek likes speaking numbers out loud. Derek likes listening to numbers being spoken.
Derek listens to a variety of Numbers' Stations. His current favourite is the Lincolnshire Poacher. Derek's ambition is to create a Numbers'' Station for Time Travellers. An ambition that led to a conversation in which I agreed to fund a temporal caper that involved travelling to 1960 to invest in shares. A caper interrupted by the precipitous mugging of Derek by a punk with a mohican in 1979.
The fourteen pass phrases of the Leeds Fourteen Stations of the Crass Pub Crawl obviously encypted something. Derek was not really forthcoming about what, exactly. What he was forthcoming about was that, whatever was encoded, would be the key to solving the mugging. This was not really good news. Good news would have been some kind of statement about solving the problem of encrypting something so that Time Travellers could not easily put the encrypted message into a computer back in at the Big Bang and toddle along to the Heat Death Of The Universe to pick up the plaintext. Proclaiming: "892,605,777,684,200,300" was really far more profound.
As I said, earlier, Derek is not stupid but he is not bright. Had Derek thought it through and looked at the Stations of the Crass Pub Crawl he could have deduced who mugged him. The June 4 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall Manchester Punk Concert was not going to yield the clues he wanted. At least not easily. What Derek really needed to know was which Thursday in the 1980s was the date he popped back to 1979. The mugger was obviously in the Pub with him. The non fungible token of a Night down the Pub was exactly the kind of thing a Time Traveller, wanting to avoid trouble, would really go for.
