Day 194 - Time Travel

 TIME TRAVEL

Prompt - Time Travel : If there was a time period you could visit for a day, where would you go?  Write about travelling back in time to that day.

Time travel has become such a common fictional device, and the basis for one of the most popular children's TV programmes of them all, that we rarely stop to think about the practicalities involved were it to be something we could do in reality.  It used to be bad enough returning to work after a three week holiday and having to adjust to the changes!

But if I could really choose to go back in time for a twenty four hour period what would be the purpose?  There are two main possible motivations.  The first being to see if one could alter histroy for the better while there, the second purely for the enjoyment and/or education to be afforded from being somewhere you always longed to be.  

If I was going to go back and try to change the world my first thought would be to go back less than seven years, to the evening of the sixteenth of September 2014, with the intent of convincing more people to vote Yes in the independence referendum.  But that's when the practicalities kick in.  How, in just one day, can you convince the right person (politician?  broadcaster?  journalist?) that you really do come from the not too distant future, and that these are all the things the No side are saying that will turn out to be lies.  And then get that information out so that the majority of people in the country get to hear about it - and believe it.  There are just too many 'if' moments in the basic concept for it to ever have a chance of succeeding.  There's also the law of unintended consequences, the "butterfly beats it's wings in Brazil" factor, where introducing one change into history also enables others.  Unpredictable others, some of which might turn out to have even greater negative effects.  Although what could be nore negative than still being stuck in Brexshit Britain is hard to imagine.

So instead I will have to go for the pleasure principle.  Where and when would I want to go back to, who would I hope to meet and talk with?  This is a question beloved of TV interviewers of the shallower kind, and one that many people give the appearance of having an immediate answer for.  I am not one of them.  It's back to those pesky practicalities.  Twenty four hours means having somewhere to sleep for a night, means being able to fit unobtrusively into an older and perhaps foreign society, meaning clothes, manners and language would have to fit in.  Am I able to take those things as read and simply let myself slip into the fantasy?  there are no rules here, so why not?  Only my own annoying habit of wanting to know the details underlying any scenario...  (I can't decide if this is a good or a bad thing to be as a wannabe writer!)

So would I go back to meet one of my heroes?  And risk them turning out to be far less than I imagined them to be, or them to hate the person I am?  Perhaps Burns, among the literati of eighteenth century Edinburgh?  To hear what the great poet sounded like, perhaps in one of the salons he attended, and see how the city looked during the great transition period when the New Town was first being constructed.  The notion of visiting Van Gogh also appeals, but he might be a hard man to be with.  But if I could come across him in a field near the asylum in Arles, to sit and watch him create magic in front of me... how special a moment would that be.  I might even sleep out under the same stars he so memorably painted.

Or Raeburn Place in 1871, when Scotland beat England in the first ever rugby international?  What was the game like to watch in it's infancy?  What was the crowd like?  Was the rivalry as real and intense in Victorian times?  

None of this speculation satisfies the brief set out in today's prompt.  I can't even make up my mind on the when and where and who, so it hasn't been possible to move on to write about what it might have been like to be there - wherever 'there' turned out to be.  Today, when I am suffering from back pain, does not feel like one when I can give into the fantastic, I am unable to let go of reality to the necessary degree.  But on another day... who knows?