As hard as I try to keep up to the minute in this column, I’m aware what a futile battle I’m fighting. It might be here and now in Sydney as I write, but it’s three hours earlier in Malaysia, and in any case it’ll be at least 48 hours before it goes up on Malaysiakini for a few days before being consigned to history in the virtual archives.

So this week, for a change, instead of commenting at length on anything timely, like the outrageous arrest of Paula Khoo at the Georgetown anti-ISA vigil, or the 12 ridiculous conditions on which the police issued a permit for the PJ anti-ISA vigil, or Zorro’s "outing" of RockyBru as an agent of Mahathirism, I thought I’d hark back to my recent trip to London.

Back in October my son and daughter-in-law generously paid my fare and lots of other expenses to go stay with them there for a fortnight or so.

I was a bit concerned at the timing of their largesse, lest it tax their domestic budget too heavily just as the global financial crisis was starting to wreak havoc in the UK.

But, possibly seeing my advancing age and some health concerns I’d had as intimations that time was running out for me to see them again, and to finally meet their children, my granddaughter and grandson, they insisted on going ahead.

And I’m very thankful they did, as flying to London to see them all proved an exercise in time travel that made me feel like Dr Who in his Tardis.

Not that the journey proved quite as quick in fact as in science fiction. Fourteen hours with Etihad to a three-hour stopover in Abu Dhabi, then another eight hours to Heathrow.

That was where I experienced the first truly serious time-warp of the trip. Emerging into the arrival hall, the first glimpse of my son with a four-year-old and a two-year-old in tow transported me back forty years to the memory of him as a toddler.

But his two tiny companions instantly brought me back to the year 2008; to the moment of truth that this was a meeting of not just three generations, but three dimensions in time: the past, present and future.

Shades of a colonial past

And London seemed an altogether appropriate location as any for such considerations of time and relativity. If time is a river, as has often been said, then the Thames, as much as the Tiber, the Seine, the Nile, The Tigris, Euphrates, Yangtse, Ganges, Amazon and Mississippi, is one of mankind’s great streams of consciousness.

The city on its banks has survived 21 centuries of invasions, fires, plagues, revolutions, the rise and fall of empires, wars, terrorist bombings, economic booms and busts.

But to my grandchildren so far it’s simply home, school and playground. I had a great time with them as well as their parents, uncle, aunt, cousins, maternal grandmother and various friends in lots of locations including the park behind the BBC, the Princess Diana memorial playground and the glorious Kew Gardens.

Kew Gardens aren’t just for fun, of course. For 250 years they’ve also been a fund of botanical riches, including the first rubber trees in transit from their native South America to plantations in colonial Malaya.

Shades of the colonial past are also highly evident in the suburb where my London family lives, Shepherd’s Bush.

In fact, despite its Victorian-era architecture and thoroughfares with names as characteristically English as Uxbridge, Ethelden and Stanlake, contemporary Shepherd’s Bush is a classic case of "the Empire strikes back".

Its streets are thronged with colonials of every colour, race and creed, and businesses with names as varied and diverse as Abu Zaad Damascene Cuisine, Babylon Pharmacy, Quashie’s Roti Hut, Zain Textiles, King Solomon’s Kebab and Ochi Caribbean Takeaway.

As fascinating as I found present-day Shepherd’s Bush, however, I also took the time to travel deep into London’s past, a fascinating m é lange of the murky, murderous and magnificent.

Ten minutes or so on the tube one day found my son and I in Smithfield, the scene centuries ago of the bloody end to the Peasants’ revolt, and where "heretics" were burned alive beside the present-day Bart’s Hospital.

A half-hour stroll and we were in literary London, exploring the house in Gough Square where Dr Johnson created his famous dictionary, then the Church of St Bride’s Fleet Street where John Milton was born and Samuel Pepys baptised, and in whose crypt the first printing press with moveable type was installed in 1500 by the wonderfully-named Wynken de Word.

A walk back in time

And then we walked a few blocks and several centuries to where my son treated me to lunch at Rules, London’s oldest surviving restaurant and a favourite of luminaries ranging from Dickens and Thackeray through John Galsworthy, HG Wells, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

Another day I descended into the darker side of history, with a walk across London Bridge to Southwark, sites of the long-gone Clink and Marshalsea Prisons, then back across the river to the grim, grey Tower and on up to the old execution site of Tower Green beside a surviving fragment of the ancient London Wall.

One of the principal delights of time travel is that you can move about at random. Finding yourself lost in the mists of antiquity at one moment, communing with the effigies of the Templar Knights in their old round chapel, or musing on the significance of a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, then in the next instant jerked back to the 21st century by the newspaper you read while you pause for a smoke and a coffee.

And of course you don’t need to leave home to do it, because it’s accessible in books, and ultimately all in the mind. Sometimes to a mind-bending degree.

For example, just as I was reminded of Malaysia by the rubber trees of Kew Gardens, I was irritated to find that I could never encounter the word "medieval" in London without thinking of Umno’s out-dated mentality, and the fact that it’s still being promoted by the medi-evil Dr Mahathir.

All I can hope in that regard is that, if you and I don’t live to see the world rid of such antiquated anti-democratic antics, at least it’s possible in our children’s or grandchildrens’ time.