Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

I've just dialled up the year 2036 on my time machine. We can report that 20 years from now some things have changed since 2016, some have not.

John Minto is into his sixth term as mayor of Christchurch. Winston Peters is rallying against immigration. Helen Clark is vying for a plum job with the UN. A frail but defiant Colin Craig is embroiled in a very public spat over his modelling deal with an incontinence underwear company. Tauranga is debating to have a museum or not and pondering whether it would be a good idea to have four lanes on Turret Rd. A French hitchhiker is just now figuring out why no-one will give him a ride out of Punakaiki.

Coal-powered electrical generation has been phased out and the Big Save Furniture lady's mouth has been connected to an alternator and is feeding the national grid.

How bizarre, I hear you exclaim! What is Rogers doing with a time machine? Good question, and my Dad can help answer that.

The ancient family relic, (the time machine, not my Dad) was uncovered while sorting through several generations of priceless family heirlooms at the old homestead; some of them quite revealing and disturbing. Such as a first prize certificate in scone baking my gran Vera Wallace won as a child at the 1924 Ngaruawahia Horticultural Society show. This information is quite contrary to that promoted by my grandfather, Claude Forster, who years later led us to believe he was the champion scone maker of the family.

Which throws into doubt some of his other assertions… such as, when you drop marbles off the high level bridge in Hamilton, they don't fall straight; but travel down in a curve, before landing in the Waikato River.

Claude reckoned it was because of the earth's rotation. Or was it because the marbles developed a spin on the way down? Whatever the explanation, it was easier to believe than the scone story. And it confirms our suspicions that the folk of Hamilton have always been a bit short of worthwhile things to do. Not much has changed in several generations.

It could also explain why Gran sometimes said Grandad had lost his marbles.

But back to the mysterious time piece.

It's a special clock with magical powers. Sure, the hands go round the dial and it ticks like a regular clock. But this one is different. It goes in reverse. Yes folks, time goes backwards. We were about to consign it to the rubbish pile, when suddenly I realised just how special a reverse time machine really is. That, and the fact that I was desperately short of a subject for a column this week.

And with daylight saving starting this weekend, we could see all sorts of potential mayhem with the time going forward an hour, at the same time the time was going backwards.

Finally we can reveal that we have the power to achieve what physicists, science fiction, the person in charge of the pie warmer on the Hindenburg, Cher, the abortionist in Hitler's hometown, and Brad Pitt have been dreaming about. The ability to turn back time.

Which is how we ended up ripping to shreds the fabric of the space-time continuum and leapfrogging several decades into the future. I could tell you a lot more about the next couple of decades, but during our time travels we were warned by those in the future to avoid messing with the past, as it drastically affects the future.

We could end up trapped, they said, in an aberration in space… a time warp; and wearing tights like Richard O'Brien.

The people in the future did say however, the Americans should seriously re-think the concept of electing that Trump idiot.

Overwhelmed with the pressure of holding the fate of mankind in the balance, we scurried back to 2016 and dodged the responsibility.

Your mission this weekend, however, is to leap time forward merely an hour, in accordance with New Zealand Daylight Time.

This can be done either Saturday night before bed, or at an ungodly hour of the morning, or when you awake on Sunday.

In our household, we're experimenting more with the time machine and wonder, if we let it tick backwards long enough, we could venture back to the 1920s and perhaps relax on the banks of the Waikato for a picnic, with a little fresh cream, home-made plum jam, enjoying the prize-winning scones of a bygone era.

Provided, that is, we are not sconed by terminal velocity marbles.