With this week’s blog, we decided on a couple of ground rules:
• No coming back – you can’t just spend the weekend.
• You blend in – language, costume and customs are a given.
• No killing Grandpa – Star Trek timelines are off the table.
There has only ever been one time I wish I could have experienced in the past. I would so love to have seen with my own eyes Britain’s railways at its peak, say around 1910, when the network boasted a staggering 32,000km of track, run by 120 competing companies! Virtually every village and indeed hamlet had a station close by, for it was the only way to get around the local area, and further beyond.
Our Victorian builders were amazing. Most of our existing 21st century network of railways is built upon the original infrastructure, now coming up to nearly 200 years old, which just shows how brilliant our forefathers were. I would so much liked to have travelled along some of the most remote branch lines, now long extinct, or the new commuter pathways into our major cities, like London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff.
But wait a minute. If I’m transported back in time to those halcyon days of our railways, WW1 was only a few years away. Even if I survived that, WW2 would rear its ugly head only two decades later. Knowledge of medicine at that time was mediocre at best; everybody would smell quite disgustingly compared to today, and the class system was quite appalling compared to today’s standards.
I accept that so much of today’s values, morals and ethics have declined as social media madness takes hold, but compared to living in the past, we just about pass muster.
Give me the present over the past, any time.
Would I go back in time?
Yes, I would.
Since my early years, I’ve heard very interesting stuff about America, then (like, unfortunately, now,) Russia’s paramount enemy.
From my childhood, I remember pictures with big, mighty cars. Since the 80s, I remember movies like “Convoy” or “Crocodile Dundee”, Jack London books, and so much more. All those fancy memories helped shaped me.
In fact, I would like to go back in time to 1970s America. Visually, “Convoy” with its great character, the Rubber Duck by Kris Kristofferson, is the picture of a country in which I would like to live.
Certainly, I could be missing numerous real-life details. Yet, at this age, I think I would have felt comfortable there.
No political correctness yet. A V8 Dodge Challenger. Big trucks driven by tough but great guys, just like in the movie. Roadside diners. Light American beer, like Bud or Michelob. At the same time, something troubling was in the air, be it Vietnam or a nuclear war risk.
A pre-digital era. Vinyl discs. Still, so much difference with the Soviet Union in which I was born and grew up.
…lookin’ at the Kris Kristofferson character in “Convoy”, I know I want to be a friend of his, enjoying the amazing spirit of America in the 70s.
P.S. This could be weird, but to me, the Stones video “Waiting on a Friend”, is an urban outlook of that good ol’ America.
Would I go back in time?
Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia, has a lovely Grandfather Clock in the foyer. I bring this up because the clock only has one hand; the hour hand. If it’s vaguely two, that’s close enough. Time moved at a different pace then.
Unfortunately, for every Thomas Jefferson there were thousands of Dean Lewises. His Majesty’s American colonies had the highest standard of living in the world but almost everyone lived in what you would consider abject poverty. I was looking through the court records at The Fairfax County Courthouse one day when I came across a case from the 1770s. A woman was found guilty of stealing a shovel full of grain and was whipped. Read that again; why would a woman, a mother, steal a shovel full of grain?
Even the large, named homes of the landed gentry were mostly simple wooden structures that would be smallish by today’s standards. We preserve the large, beautiful homes and castles of famous people. While that’s good, it leaves us with a false impression of life down through history. Pick any random time and the average person lived in a nasty, one room shack with an oiled dirt floor. The entire family worked the farm until the sun went down. Children were not named until their first birthday and you can guess the reason. Life was brutal, grinding and unfair.
From the Renaissance until today, every generation (mostly) has lived better than the one before. It’s a trend that’s only accelerating. The three writers of this blog would most likely be dead had we lived in the past. While the occasional person would live into her eighties, old age is a modern invention. Ailments were untreated. Something as minor as high blood pressure would be undiagnosed and you would simply die, hoe in hand, in a field under the hot sun. Historians and doctors now agree; George Washington was killed by his medical treatment (repeated blood-letting), not the simple throat infection he caught after riding on a wet, cold day.
So, thank you but I’ll pass. I don’t want to go back in time.