Would you prefer to have been born in a different era?

This is a golden age for humanity, and I'm lucky to be living at this time. Any earlier and my life would be different by virtue of my gender, a previously fatal illness, and without the multitude of things from easy and affordable travel and modern medicine and housing, up to and including the internet that makes life so incredibly easy and interesting in comparison with only a generation or two ago.

Life isn't the struggle it used to be for the majority of people in the first world, we live longer, are better educated, are housed better, and expect to live our lives with a greater degree of contentment and happiness than ever before. Maybe a little too much expectation.

It's still a wonderful time to be alive.

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

Okay Candie but if you were to go back for, say, a year to a place and time to experience its zeitgeist when/where would you choose.

I guess living through the entire Axial Age would exceed average life expectancy by a little too much, so I'll settle for the twenty years that made up the Age of Invention from 1870 -1890 when human artistry and ingenuity went into overdrive and the telephone, the car, steam and gas turbines, the first vaccinations, the phonograph and a load of other stuff I can't remember was invented, and great writers and artists like Twain, Chekov, Rodin and Doztoevsky were made immortal.

Disco would have been fun too though.

Arcade_Tryer wrote: »

Life expectancy is a bit of a meaningless statement. Standard of living is so much more important. Obviously a blend of both is preferable, but if I had to select one, it would always be standard of living over life expectancy. Though I guess it's probably a causal relationship in most cases.

The Axial Age spanned around 800 years, that's what I meant when I said it was a little too much to wish for to have lived through it entirely.

I'd love to have my own version of Seán Ó Ríordáin's Fill Arís, except this time go back to Kinsale armed with 21st-century weapons to sort the Sasanaigh out once and for all.

Then I'd like to drop into the poets of 18th-century Munster - particularly into the tavern of Seán Ó Tuama an Ghrinn on Mungret Street in Limerick - and meet Seán Clarach Mac Donaill, Eoghan Rua Ó Suilleabhain, Brian Merriman and all the rest. What a world to have lived in!

For some reason the georgian era always makes me think of the smell of vomit, milk, old brass metal, sweat, manure. I imagine having gout and having severe headaches from dehydration due to drinking wine and brandy and not drinking enough clean water. And I think of surgery being performed without anesthetic by some fat red-faced man wearing the kind of wig only judges wear now. Disease all around, people going around with pockmarks or smallpox itself. Probably a bit too far back in time for my liking!

One era that appeals to me is circa 1890s to 1914. I know the reality must have been different but I imagine it to have been an optimistic time, the people living through the times having never known anything better. No major war in Europe since 1870, lots of inventions since then, actual starvation had stopped being a serious threat since food could be transported via trains and steamship and could be better preserved. The old Mitchell and Kenyon films on youtube are great - everyone seems really happy in them, despite living in considerable poverty by modern standards. They go to watch football matches, kids enjoy playing in the streets, motor cars are a rarity, agicultural shows, cricket matches played in a relaxed atmosphere ...

When I think of the 1890s I think of the colour lavender, oscar wilde, music halls, women with those dresses that come out at the back and with narrow waists, that eerie feeling of it being a world now forgotten even though it's not actually ancient yet, with popular sportsmen, entertainers and important politicians of the time now forgotten by most. I imagine that old turn of the century font, as seen on Mr Burns' "Brain and Nerve Tonic" in the Simpsons. I imagine straw-boat hats. I imagine a sort of languid but content feeling on a Sunday afternoon after the dinner, sitting in a clustered living room where the colour brown predominates, and a dank smell of tobacco and tea fills the warm, stuffy room, with the sun shining through windows and a beam of dust is seen, the father wearing a waistcoat sitting reading the newspaper with hair parted in the middle and a moustache.

In Ireland I imagine dusty country roads in the summer time with sweet-smelling yellow gorse on the sides, people on old-fashioned bicycles, people eating stuff like kidneys and tongue, middle-class people are quaintly interested in irish revival stuff, people actually live in houses quite comfortable in comparison to the cabins many lived in a few decades before. And old lad in a waist coat with a beard everywhere except his moustache rides on a donkey-cart full of turf. Sugar, tea, bread and tobacco are available in small amounts in the local shop. Men in chequered trousers and farming hats and smoking a pipe walk with fishing rods to the river and nod their hat to you. Newspapers and books are easily available and evenings are whiled away reading them smokng a bit of tobacco. Gaslight and trams in Dublin city centre. Going to the seaside is a hugely fun day out, and they have those boxes in the water where you can get changed into a bathing suit. Punch and judy shows and carnival games, good times!

Idealistic waffle obviously but the mental image is comforting!