I'm more than happy to live a mundanely happy life and have never pined to be transported to other, more lively times.
But if I were to find myself somewhere, sometime else, I'd plump for England around 1645 - 1649. Not for the depressing violence of the period - there's nothing civil about any civil war. But for the ideas (of a social and political nature) - and the amazing speed of the development of those ideas. Imagine, an army that worked as a genuine radical force for democracy!
Some years back I heard a dramatization for radio of the Putney Debates and all I can say is I wish I'd been there. And I hope I would have had the courage to have been on the losing side.
As it is, Rainsborough's words ring down the centuries - words that would have been almost unsayable just ten years before this - and I suppose if I had a political creed, they would be at its centre: For really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee.
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