best time to be alive

[mollykins]

Considering every aspect of life including the person such as race, religion, gender and age, as well as how well of they were (probably quite would be the answer)

aswell as when they'd be alive and where, (considering disease, taxes, crime etc)

who and when would be the best time to be alive in the history of humanity?

Hoepfully that made sense.

I'd say perhaps a victorian mill owner. Many cures for diseases had been found, I don't think taxes were that high, there wasn't the world wars to harm you . . . . . .

[mollykins]

Yeha but posh mill owners were unlikely to be press ganged I would have thought drunken out of work men could have been taken easierly.

[dothawkes31]

No Molly they didn't have conscription in the 19th century, but what haooened was that a master would send 2 or 3 of his servants to serve in the army in his name, that was a tradition going back since the first permanent standing army in the 1600s. They got paid a pittance but their family was compensated (though not very well) if the substitute was killed or injured in action,

[paddywak]

It's all very well if you were the mill owner or part of his family, but if you weren't molly, at your age you'd have been working in the mill or down the local mine for for the last 7-8 years

[jno]

yes, you'd have to have chosen your parents much more carefully in the 19th century!

[MarkRae]

I've always thought that I'd have preferred to have been born in 1948. It must have been wonderful to be 19 in 1967...

[boxtops]

I promise you, MarkRae, it was....

[paddywak]

As boxy says markrae, it was brilliant

[boxtops]

walking on sunshine, paddywak... (OK I know the song was many years later, but it did seem to be sunshine every day in those far-ff years!)

[boxtops]

^ far-off, of course

[jno]

Indeed, I have a rear-view mirrror on my Zimmer frame so I can look back to 1967.

[paddywak]

Though it was out in 1967 the song that always conjures up the 60's for me is Groovin by The Young Rascals, my first serious relationship which lasted nearly 3 years started about the time it was realised and where ever we went it seemed to be playing, happy days.

[jno]

actually, I've just looked it up and the number one hits that year included 13 weeks - a quarter of the year! - by Tom Jones (Green Green Grass of Home) and Engelbert Humperdinck. What a load of rubbish. Fortunately the music further down the charts was better.

[MarkRae]

Both superb singers.

I can't actually remember 1967, though I was alive. My earliest memory is of sitting on my aunt's knee watching the Beatles on television on the roof of the Apple building, and my aunt telling me which one was which...

[jno]

superb singers but no business being on the top of a Hit Parade as they then were; definitely the mums' choice. It's sometimes said that teenagers had accumulated all the buying power by that era; facts like this suggest otherwise.

[boxtops]

Fabulous bands leading up to that year, everything from 1962 onwards was just wonderful..... I've still got some of the music on vynil.

[MarkRae]

> superb singers but no business being on the top of a Hit Parade as they then were

No business? What a strange comment. They had every right to be number one since they had sold more copies of their single the previous week than any other artist - that's actually how the charts worked back then...

[boxtops]

... you could go into a little cubbyhole in the record shop and hear a single playing before you bought it. They threw us out when we spent too long in there without buying anything.

[jno]

Sure, and so for a couple of weeks did Sinatra. But that suggests 1967 wasn't the time to be 19, it was the time to be 35. The real feel of what 1967 was like for 19-year-olds is not to be found in its number ones.

[paddywak]

boxy, even though I've changed a lot of my favorite discs to CD Ive still got all my vinyls, Rolling Stones , Beatles, The Who, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, loads of stuff. I've still got my trusty Technics turntable and play them every now and then

[MarkRae]

I liked Sinatra, Humperdinck and Jones when I was 19...