If Time Travel tourism became a reality, what would you like to experience?

My son asked me the other day whether I would like to have lived in the past (I suspect he thinks I already do). It’s a question I’ve often pondered (it’s up there with my Desert island Discs selection, that sweet moment when the oldest batsman ever to have represented England cracks yet another six at Lords to clinch an Ashes series, and, of course, my Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Screenwriter).

As I pointed out, the real problem would be that I’d probably have been dead by this age – several times over. Secondly, if one were to be whisked into the past with one’s modern sensibilities intact, there’d be a whole variety of stenches to get used to – body odour, open sewers running down the street – as well as the filthiness of sheets and unwashed hair and lack of baths: in fact, a general question mark over basic standards of hygiene (I may have been warped by reading Swift’s deeply coprophobic poetry for A level). The pain wouldn’t be much fun either – just imagine what most operations would have been like, or having to cope with the chronic gout I’d have no doubt suffered from. Then there’s the distinct possibility of not being able to earn a living and starving to death. And having to kowtow to one’s betters (of which there would have been an awful lot) would be difficult after living in a non-deferential modern democracy.

Without one’s modern sensibilities, the exercise would be pointless – for all I know, I might be living in the past (or the future) right now.

So, on the whole, the answer would be… no thanks!

What would be exciting, though, would be Time Travel tourism, i.e. being whisked back to witness specific events, and being whisked home again before being able to contract cholera or syphilis or break a leg, or even having to go to the lavatory – but, given some of my choices, the last might prove a bit difficult to avoid.

So, on the verge of sleep last night, I began listing the people and events Ifrom the past  would choose to experience, whilst retaining full current awareness, and provided with a universal babelfish (no doubt a variant of the Translator Phone Google is developing). Here, in no particular order, are the items on my dream (strictly pre-dream) list I could remember when I woke up:

Attend the first performance of Das Rheingold at Bayreuth in 1876, and be a guest in the Wagner villa at Tribschen on Christmas morning 1870 when Mrs. W was woken by a small ensemble on the stairs playing the Siegfried Idyll, written to celebrate the birth of their son; joining Boswell and Dr Johnson for a few hours on their tour of the Highlands and Western Isles (preferably with the good Doctor in a loquacious mood) or enjoying a few pints with them at the Cheshire Cheese; be present when Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, just to see if we missed anything; attend the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; sit in on a Billy Wilder/Charles Brackett scriptwriting session for Sunset Boulevard; attend a soirée at Whistler’s Chelsea studio; visit William Blake in his cottage at Felpham and hear him in full mystical flow; been in the House of Commons gallery on 18th June 1940 for Churchill’s “This was their finest hour” speech; attended gatherings in the Cambridge rooms of both F.R. Leavis and Wittgenstein when they were at the height of their powers; take tea with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake District, and attend one of Coleridge’s London lectures or walk with him on Hampstead Heath in later life, when he had become the “Sage of Hampstead”; attend the first performance of Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia in Gloucester Cathedral; enjoy an hour’s psychoanalytic session with Jung – immediately followed by one with Freud; queue up with everyone else for an issue of the Strand Magazine containing the latest Sherlock Holmes story; ride with Marco Polo across the High Pamirs and be there when he and his party were first ushered into the presence of Kublai Khan; be present at the official unveiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings and of the first public viewing of the Pietá; be in London on VE Day – and when news of the victories at Waterloo and Trafalgar came through; be at Sun Studios in Memphis on the day in 1954 when Elvis and Scotty and Bill created their version of “That’s All Right, Mama”; attend Queen Victoria’s funeral; attend the first performance of Macbeth at the Globe; be on set when Orson Welles extemporised (allegedly) his “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man; be present at a  Private Eye editorial meeting during the Profumo scandal; stand on an Oslo quayside and wave to my father as his ship set sail for Canada in 1925…

That’s as far as I got.

I’ve no idea if this is an illuminating exercise – and it wasn’t much help when it came to getting to sleep - but I enjoyed it. Do feel free to share your own version.