The Impossible Journey by Virginia Hainsworth

I have always wanted to be a time traveller.  To fly backwards across the centuries and peep into the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people.  To eavesdrop on their conversations, to touch their clothes, their lives.  To see through their eyes.

I would first go for afternoon tea with Charles II.  I know that afternoon tea hadn’t been invented then, but hey, I’m making the rules in this journey of journeys.  I want to see for myself if he’s as charming, suave, intelligent and witty as history reports.

I would peer into The Tower, where the princes are sleeping and wait to see who comes to take their lives, asking at whose bidding they come.  Time travellers cannot change the past, much as I would want to save those little boys.

I would gaze into the fire with stone age men and women, so I could return to my junior school and bring history projects to life with sights, sounds, smells and fireside tales.

I would slip back into the lives of loved ones who are no longer here, to spend one last day with them.  To tell them I love them.  And to kiss them farewell.

I would sail on The Beagle with Charles Darwin to witness his excitement about new discoveries and to ask him if he foresaw the storm of controversy that his theories would bring about.

I would spend some time in the 1920’s.  Firstly to New York to listen to George Gerschwin playing Rhapsody in Blue.  Just for me.  And whilst there, I would buy a tasselled dress and dance the Charleston.  Then I would don warmer clothes and sit atop Mount Everest in 1924 to look for George Mallory.  Did he reach that far, I wonder.

I would visit Charles Dickens and ask for a lesson or two in creative writing.  And from Jane Austen, too.

I would swim in the sea off Taormina, Sicily in the years before tourists arrived.  Then eat spaghetti vongole with the locals.

I would go back to my French class when I was 11 years old and pay more attention.  Then perhaps I would find learning the language again much easier, many years later.

I would dine in a hunting lodge in Tsavo, Kenya with Karen Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton.  And go on  safari with them.  To shoot photos, not animals.

But wherever I went, I would always want to return to the here and now.  For to be in the present moment is all there is.

So….where would you go?