If you could travel back to any time period…

[AmazingBouncingFerret]

Any era or civilisation, any social class, what would it be?

I’m torn between being aristocratic in Regency England because everything was obviously just like a Jane Austen novel or maybe the roaring twenties, even though I’m not the biggest fan of jazz I wouldn’t have minded the rising hemlines and risqué nightclubs.

I asked my husband and he genuinely started muttering something about Romans, which is hilarious considering he’s an almost 50 year old with no social media so he wouldn’t have seen or heard of the Roman Empire thing.

@LunaNorth 1970s New York - I want to spend a night at Studio 54.

Oh yes, take me with you please. David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Tom Ford,Jerry Hall, Richard Gere in his heyday and Bianca Jagger on a white horse. Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci.

The glamour!

I think about this a lot : 1930’s and into the 1940’s.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,”

L.P. Hartley in his 1953 novel “The Go-Between.”

“ How we understand the past and how we come to terms with our own memories, is an unpaid debt that all humans share”.

I’d revisit 80s but ensure I had a bit more money and freedom! My DM choose virtually all my clothes unless my nana gave me money for them! I once got a trendy white and aqua short sleeved striped blouse, long turquoise fishtail skirt, turquoise baggy shirt, navy long skirt and turquoise and white t shirts and turquoise canvas shoes (all Top Shop) by telling a white lie and saying my school let us wear these now and it wasn’t far off our blue uniform!

Whew! I feel better now

Me too, 60s or 70s definitely.

Ooh yes - at first I couldn’t get over the idea of going back to a time with less medical care, but if I could be location specific I’d love to observe life in my village in the early 1900s. It’s on the south coast so I would be part of the nouveau riche building big houses.

Not sure if I would want to stick around for WW1 though.

Shakespeare's day. I'd be a brilliant young actor who passes as male and we'd work together on his scripts...

Or they would have to commit a crime to steal someone else's contactless card. And as soon as this is cancelled they need to commit more crime to get another card.
Its all a fantasy so they would have Psychic paper, as per Doctor Who.

I would do this as well. My mum used to tell wonderful stories about how everyone pulled together during the war, sheltering down the tube stations etc. I know the reality would be absolutely terrifying but I agree that the nation was probably at it's best then.

It's too hard to choose!

1960s London and San Francisco
1970s where I grew up
Also 1980s
1920s London and Paris and maybe Prague and Berlin
1900s India
London in the Elizabethan era to take in a performance of Hamlet
Medieval England somewhere, preferably rural.

I'd need a huge suitcase for the souvenirs.

June 2016 before the act of economic self harm would do for me.

But surely you already lived through that time? Or would you just have it on a loop?

Regency or Edwardian - but only if I am wealthy and can wear all the fab frocks!

Athens 410-420bc
Definitely need to be high status and male if possible!

Meet Socrates and maybe Plato and just watch a major leap forward in how humans see ourselves and the world.

If we get to choose our status & wealth & where we live, and all our paperwork & finances etc is all sorted (a la Dr Who), I would time travel back to yesterday, and enjoy my improved status, wealth & fancy clothing.

I'll get my coat.

" be high status and male"
The key to a good life in most eras!

Me too! I think about this far too much .

I'd have the best shiny gold flares and halter neck top, huge hair and be able to dance.

As an observer, I'd like to go and see my parents when they were growing up. And all my relatives when they were young.

I think we have an unrealistic almost romanticised view of the past, certainly when it comes to medicine, healthcare and even the lack of equality, certainly but not exclusively, for women.

Pre-penicillin a bad tooth could kill you and the first person they tried to treat was a policeman who pricked his finger on a rose thorn in his garden, he died.

You then had horrors like Polio, hooping cough, diphtheria and of course TB.

If you go back further to the Victorian period you had Cholera, Typhus and malnuitricition, to mention a few, People literally died of exhaustion from overwork. And there was widespread homelessness. How about treating syphilis with mercury or try dentistry in a northern mill town?. And there was no contraception or abortion ( which was illegal anyway ).

Women couldn't own property and were stuck in domestic service or were mill workers from the age of 12 ( even younger in the earlier industrial period ) where they got their "cloth ears " from the noise of the machinery.

I could go on but I don't want to put a downer on what is an interesting thread and subject. I just want to remind everybody of the realities, like childbirth mortality rates in Regency London.

1989 - I made a key decision then, that if I had the chance to return, I'd do differently.

I'd love to see how life would've been had I taken the other path.

I think most people on this thread are well aware of that thanks.
We want to visit not emigrate.

Just a strong suspicion. She had a son before marriage and gave him the same Christian name as a farm hand her parents employed at the time but the surname on the birth certificate was hers as an unmarried mother. In all subsequent census returns and for the rest of his life, this son was recorded with the farm hand's surname too. Seems an odd thing to if the father was someone else.

So just a fantasy then ?

We want to visit not emigrate.

Where do we hide the Time Machine so we can return?

I desperately want to know which version of Richard III is the truth, so his court.

1920s-1930s