DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

Would you like to have lived in another time? YES The Washington Post has just been playing a New Year party game in which it chose the Man of the Millennium - Genghis Khan - and the Time and Place of the Millennium, Titian's Venice. Runners-up in the latter category were New York in the 1940s, Paris in the 1920s and Elizabethan England, which demonstrate a certain Western-centricity (what, no Constantinople?). No sooner had the list been published than everyone in this office began arguing about it, rubbishing Venice and substituting such magic millennial moments as Ming Dynasty China, 12th-century Cambodia and 17th-century France. Nobody said, even in mild apology, 'Hmm, actually I really like 1990s Hong Kong.' I bet you're already running through an historical checklist of your own by now; the romantic inclination to do a spot of time travel is pretty ingrained. I spent most of my adolescence regretting that I hadn't been around in Arthurian England or late 19th-century Russia (how lovely to live on a vast estate and admire the silver birches in spring), and I still yearn to have seen the full glory of Mogul India. Go to the Red Fort in Delhi or the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir ('If on earth there is paradise, it is this, it is this, it is this,' as the Mogul emperors sighed) and you can almost hear the smothered laughter and jingling earrings of long-dead court ladies. I wish I had been one of them.

You will note, of course, that I don't have any great desires to be a Mogul chicken-slaughterer or the woman who had to scour the steps at Camelot. If we're talking about returning to the past, I'd like to be there in a fairly swanky capacity and in good health, please. No wisdom teeth problems, appendicitis or gruesome childbirths, although I used to like the idea of consumption when I was about nine - all that fever-bright coughing into titchy handkerchiefs, as demonstrated by Keats and Camille and the Brontes, seemed to be a literary requirement.

Is this evidence of a morbid, dissatisfied psyche? Well, if it is, I'm in crowded company. I can't believe that the 11 million people who tuned into the BBC's Pride And Prejudice every week last autumn were doing theses on social conditions prevailing in early 19th-century England. Sense And Sensibility is a hot favourite for Oscar nominations, and two versions of Emma are also coming up. Jane Austen's vignettes of a past when people danced regulated steps in homage to both family and money (Austen was an absolute pragmatist, not in the least bit romantic) are striking a noisy chord.

It's not just that people are sick of the fag-end of the 20th century. I think we're escaping that dangerous, Year Zero belief which says, 'Forget the past, let the present triumph.' How can we learn about others unless we look back in longing, squeezing up our imaginations at some dusty site, remote in time and culture, and thinking, 'What if I'd been there?' NO THE idea of being able to live in another era is tempting, assuming you are given to mindless fantasies and can't face up to your current lot in life.

Apart from being the bottom of the barrel when it comes to conversational openers, the problem with thinking about living in another age is that you always glorify the sort of person you would be. Who, for example, fantasises about going back to the Victorian age as a dustman, or returning to the Renaissance as a pizza maker? I am, I admit, given to certain fantasies about returning to the past but they have a certain character you will soon surmise. For example, if I think of going back to the days of the Romans, I imagine myself to be a successful merchant, lounging around my villa having peeled grapes popped into my mouth by nubile slaves. As I reclined next to my pool, amphoras of the finest wine the empire could provide would be poured into solid gold tankards by dusky Italian maidens, while Middle Eastern slaves with jewels in their midriffs belly-danced up and down my back. As I became increasingly drugged by the vino, I would retire to bed with five of my favourites to keep me company. My historical fantasies, are, as you can see, both sad and sexual.

Unfortunately, the fact is that if I were transferred back to Roman times at the same level of social success I have attained in my current life, ie a journalist, I would find myself working as an assistant to some doctor specialising in venereal disease in a dodgy back alley in Rome.