My current read...

....having had a contretemps out walking yesterday which involved tripping, locating the only stone in the area to contact with my mouth, made a hole in my lower lip with a tooth....and other scrapes and bruises, I am contenting myself today with my current read!    Which is excellent.

What age would you choose to live in?    For me Enlightenment Edinburgh would be the most exciting and fascinating.   If, of course, you had good health and good position!      The blurb says of Mary Cosh's book - "The development of Edinburgh into one of the great intellectual centres of Europe is paralleled in the story of the growth of the city, as architects such as James Craig and Robert Adam reflected the confidence of a new age in the wide and imposing throroughfares of the New Town, a far cry from the dank and overcrowded closes of medieval Edinburgh. "   


I mentioned "class", and in a sense the development of the New Town heralded a widening gap between social classes.  In the Old Town, everyone - Lords and Ladies, Judges, Advocates, Artisans and beggars all lived on top of one another - barring some expansions in the direction of George Square and Hope Park as the years passed by.    In the New Town there was still space for most - but a much more managed separation of upper, middle and lower classes.


But the real joy, of course, would be the exposure to the great minds in philosophy, mathematics, literature, divinity, medicine.  Amid the most sublime creations by the great architects of the day - Craig, Adam, etc.     A dinner party at Lord Mondobbo's, or a soiree at Professor Adam Ferguson's, would be the destination to which to time travel, I think.    The famous engraving of the meeting between Walter Scott and Robert Burns at Sciennes House (located in the expanded Old Town area of Hope Park)  demonstrates the kind of soup in which the Enlightenment was cultured.     The Golden Age.


So, to repeat, which Age would you choose to live in?