What would you take and leave from the past, present and future?

I'd take the washing machine.

I'd take anesthetic.

I’d take our greater gender equality, but leave the economic conditions that mean a house now costs 3½ (+) x two people’s salary when 30 years ago it was 3½ times one… (so everybody has to work so much and squeeze everything else, including their time with their kids…)

I’d take 21st century dentistry but leave the junk food.

I'd take trial by jury and leave hanging, drawing and quartering.

I’d probably take our better health care but given the choice, I’d rather take a society that helped us live really healthy lives.

I'd probably take the communities of Robin hood's era. I'd take a crofter's lifestyle but I'd also take laptops and skype and interesting work.

I'd take sing-alongs involving the whole pub.

I'd take hay making. I made hay for the first time in my life last weekend. I'm an adult. It was fantastic.
Wild flower summer meadows getting cut in September become piles of drying grass, which become a great thing to rake up while you have long, wandering conversations with your fellow haymaker. That becomes a pile of hay in the garden, becomes mulching material for the vegetables and ends the need for weedkiller or weeding. And there's no need to dig in the hay because the worms come up and get it and wiggle it down into the soil where it decomposes and becomes something like compost.

I'd keep all that.

I'm interested in the history of wellbeing. Maybe we assume we're better off than at any other point in history, mainly because of our wealth, our comforts, our freedoms, gadgets. We're scared that if we lose all that we'll slide back through all of our progress and land in a damp pile of poverty, discomfort, boredom and misery.

But maybe we can create something different. The best of the past and the best of the future.

(There's definitely room in here to explore the history of wellbeing - are we more happy than Robin Hood's merry men? and the boys that drunk together 'When Jones' ale was new my boys? and the people that wrote The Goose and The Common?' And in the contemporary world, all that nef stuff on wellbeing and gdp...