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Your Favourite Historical Period And Place

All Acting Regiment

08:06 / 03.11.05

Name it. Togas or trenches? Most of us weren't there, but why should that matter? Spanish main or spanish inquisition? Mongols or Mafeking? Go on, go on, go on.

_Boboss

08:28 / 03.11.05

seventeenth century london: plagues, fires, gin, crime, science, strife, sectarian trouble.

this question is always difficult, because, try as i might, i always just reckon i'd be one of the 90% who spent their whole life hungry and wearing potato sacks. better off where i am really.

Quantum

08:29 / 03.11.05

1920s London and Paris, 1960s Brighton and San Francisico. No internet but loads of fun.

Benny the Ball

08:38 / 03.11.05

Rome, 1st century AD, or 1939-45 AD.

Love Roman Imperial history, and though I'd probably last five minutes there, would love to see what it was like back then.

Also, always had an interest in seeing WWII, seeing if I'd be any good during it.

Jub

08:46 / 03.11.05

In the words of Bill and Ted – “the best place to be is here and the best time to be is now!”

Loomis

09:07 / 03.11.05

November 5th, 1955.

Jub

09:13 / 03.11.05

that's the *second* instance of time travel. Not the first!

Loomis

09:14 / 03.11.05

A red letter date in the history of science.

All Acting Regiment

09:17 / 03.11.05

Algerian or Morrocan territory, 1600s-1790s. You get a whole choice of bling: maybe you have a really fast warhorse, or a really brutal camel. Or an ace Xebec with triangular sails, and on the sails there's a graphic of a scorpion.

And you can zip around the desert/med reading Zoroaster or Solomnic magick or maybe reeling off bits of the Rubiyaat. Oh yes. Better than Europe which at that time was basically pray pray die die. Bring me my silk and scimitar. Oh yes.

Getting the feeling there might be some generalisations inherent in this thread.

All Acting Regiment

09:19 / 03.11.05

The Algerian Hedgehog, if anyone still needs convincing.

Kit-Cat Club

10:29 / 03.11.05

I am fascinated by London through from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth (FWIW gumbitch I think gin was more an eighteenth-century craze, 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence', etc.).

I do particularly like the seventeenth century thoguh - perhaps because of my greater familiarity with the period. Hard to pinpoint why exactly. I like to walk around the City and imagine it as it might have been - full of bustle and dirt and merchants and pickpockets etc. And fires and illness and mortality and poverty, of course.

I think I would have been one of the unmarried daughters of a yeoman farmer, and lived out my life as the bane of my nephews and nieces, always changing my will to reflect who was in and who out of favour...

Quantum

10:44 / 03.11.05

I'm re-reading the Baroque trilogy which does tempt me strangely into the seventeenth century, bewigged and armed with a rapier and some bon mots. But as someone else said, I'd probably be one of the majority i.e. poverty stricken, diseased and in an early grave.

Goodness Gracious Meme

15:38 / 03.11.05

Applying Gumbitch's rule about not being, as I would be, one of the starving millions, it'd have to be 1920s - London, Paris, New York. Flappers and gangsters, Bessie Smith, cocaine and champagne, Dorothy Parker, The Round Table/New Yorker, Bright Young Things, Vile Bodies, Mrs.Dalloway, Ulysses etc....

Alternatively, with a quick gender transformation, India, and particularly the Bengal in either the 17thC, as I would probably have been some kind of feudal lord, which would be interesting, or in the 1940s - Indian resistance, Ghandiji, SC Bose, working for Indian Independance...

grant

16:03 / 03.11.05

Why, 100,000 years B.C., in the vast floating cities of LEMURIA, of course!

Using technology powered by solar crystals and thought energy to harness the very fabric of existence! Mastering thought, time and energy as spiritual vibrations! Making smoothies from fruits now long extinct -- the ruby sap of the pomanador cane! The vibrant pulp of the domanno berry! The intoxicating musk of frindam nectar!

Yes, verily, the smoothies of Lemuria call to me across the vast abyss of time! To me, oh blender cosmic! To me, oh paring sword! To me, BLESSED CRYSTALS OF FRUIT ENERGY!

XXII:X:II = XXX

17:14 / 03.11.05

Loomis loomed: November 5th, 1955.
A red letter date in the history of science.

Thank you for saying it before I did.

Which brings to mind that as a kid I really wanted to visit the 2015 depicted in Back to the Future Part II. Maybe I just wanted a hoverboard, but I also really liked the aesthetic, as extrapolated late '80's cool as it seemed to be. Now that we're closer to that date than we are to 1989, it seems less likely that it'll even remotely resemble that particular vision, and more like the vision of the Book of Revelations. Which might be cool, too.

ONLY NICE THINGS

17:27 / 03.11.05

There's no "s". It's the Book of Revelation.

I'm impossibly taken with Kit-cat as a dowager aunt - it seems almost too perfect.

Personally, I'm loth to go anywhere without flush toilets and Lush moisturiser. Failing that, I really fancy mid-4th century Athens - this tremendously vital city realising that it very briefly had a chance to dominate the entire known world, and it cocked it, and trying to establish what to do now. Otherwise, I'd have to go for the 1920s - in which i would rattle around drinking tea with Bolsheviks, holding seances, failing utterly to solve country-house murders, claiming to have had that Radclyffe Hall and being one of the feminine men much lampooned in the pages of Punch

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:02 / 03.11.05

Oliver Postgate's head in the mid-70s.

(Sorry... I've been thinking about this one all afternoon, and still haven't come up with a better one than that).

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

10:06 / 04.11.05

18th century is my favorite period in history, not sure I'd want to live there, possibly visit, briefly. Also is it wrong to have a favorite war? Mines the Seven Year one, apparently called the French/Indian war in the colonies...I mean America.

If we're being silly then Tir Na Og before the waters came and four cities fell and it became Tir Na Cruin.

_Boboss

10:34 / 04.11.05

17th c. - i thought the gin thing felt a bit wrong. so what did the mobility use to get edgy back then then? pale ales and such? starvation?

flicking through the bible yesterday, just in an attempt to find out what poor old jezebel had done to deserve such a tarty name, i found the phillistines stealing the Ark of the covenant bit - that made me think, i don't know of any other times and places (except atlantis, mu etc.) where the locals reckoned they had a great deadly cosmic/divine radioactive battery cum big wall-smasher idol thing that they lugged around covered in cloth. i'm quite intrigued to know what all that was about really, so i'd go for a nose round there, even risking getting emerods in my secret places.

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:08 / 04.11.05

There was the Palladion in Troy, also...

_Boboss

11:47 / 04.11.05

that was a wee thing though, no? little statue of athene carved from a meteor? is there any mention of it being able to melt nazis?

Sax

13:29 / 04.11.05

I'd like to join GGM at the Algonquin, where I would smoke and drink and be unbearably witty and desirable, or on a dusty road near Mexico with Jack and Neal in the months after WWII, or in the court of Rudolf II in Prague in the latter days of the 16th Century.

grant

15:47 / 04.11.05

If we're being silly then Tir Na Og before the waters came and four cities fell and it became Tir Na Cruin.

I hear they made excellent parfait....

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:51 / 04.11.05

is there any mention of it being able to melt nazis

Strictly speaking, I think that's heterodox.

Dead Megatron

19:04 / 04.11.05

The future, of course

All Acting Regiment

19:50 / 04.11.05

The future isn't history, though, is it?

Or is it?

Woo...

Mourne Kransky

20:34 / 04.11.05

I'd have chummed along with Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood to Weimar Republic Berlin, bunking up at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in Schöneberg.

And, having been to the theatre tonight to watch Jefferson Mays' excellent one man show, I Am My Own Wife, I fancy visiting the gay bar/bordello in the cellar of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's Gründerzeit Museum, at its transgressive height with the Stasi sniffing about upstairs.

toughest, fastest, fatest

00:05 / 05.11.05

hmm, The Iriquios Confederacy in the 18th Century would be interesting, or fighting with the Makhnovschina in revolutionary Ukraine 1917-21...

Gendudehashadenough

06:01 / 05.11.05

Crete c. 2500 BCE or Egypt c. 1360 BCE. Ah, the simpler times. Rebel against that god, climb a volcano and follow this one. Or just lounge around, stoned on wine waiting for the big quake. *sips wine*

Goodness Gracious Meme

03:51 / 06.11.05

I'd have chummed along with Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood to Weimar Republic Berlin, bunking up at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in Schöneberg.

ooh! yes. can I be your unneccesary beard? I could *so* do the Sally Bowles thing

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

07:56 / 06.11.05

Ancient Rome, in the early days of the Empire, just after all the annoying rebellious people had been killed. Gotta love them crazy Romans.

Alternativly, I'd have loved to have been around back in the 20s. Back then all you needed to do to get published as a writer was be able to write a 20 page manuscript in a week to submit to the pulps. I could have made it in pulps. Plus...its the 20s. The 20s were cool.

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