I love it when these beautiful Tall Ships pull up in the harbour. Night and day they are majestic creatures of the sea.

I was lucky enough to be on the harbourside when this ship set sail out of the harbour on a previous visit.

Of course ‘setting sail’ is not quite accurate as an engine is required but either way the ship silently left the mooring. Just a gentle creaking of wood and wind murmering on furled up sails. When Sutton Harbour was at its sail boat peak there were often 300 of these wonderful  creatures jostling for space. That would not have been a silent experience with crews and harbour workers shouting instructions and demands to one another.

I would love to time hop to any point of the Age of Sail. An impossible hope of course, but what about the practicalities. First off I wear glasses so even if my clothes didn’t give me away my eyes would certainly set me apart with glazed windows on my face.

No public loos would be a worry. They were only invented after hundreds of tourists flooded into Plymouth to see Napoleon,as a celebrity prisoner, on the Bellerpharon in Plymouth Sound for ten days in July 1815. The first example of thousands of tourists flooding to one location all at the same time.  The mind boggles. The amount of effluent left on the streets of  Plymouth caused questions in Parliament. Never mind Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo. Loos of a different sort were a bigger problem and so the Public Loo was decreed to be essential for Public Health reasons.

And Public Health or indeed my own health is always a concern when I ponder time hopping. What ghastly diseases might be picked up on a casual trip back 200 years, especially in a port city!

So I will stick with just the one ship , at two different times of day. No great risk there.