Time travelling is easy.
Go to a farmers' market.
Not a poncy sun-dried goat's cheese farmers' market. A market with farmers, in a proper market
town. Selling sheep and pigs and ducks. One where they warn you when you park that your
car could get dented by an escaping bullock.
"Happened last week."
In the madding crowd there are canny groups of Thomas Hardy men,
conferring about the price of calves and black-face sheep, which are the
coolest sheep at the market.
You expect to see Bathsheba Everdene any minute, turning
heads and bartering sharply for sheep feed. You certainly see her nightie in the indoor
market, hanging on a rack with several more.
Pristine, but definitely Victorian.
You see Mellors and his jacket with all the smeared waxed
pockets and his young pheasants. And his
gun, among a lot of other guns and cages for ferrets. And ferrets.
There are the odd jarring notes. Dayglo harnesses and jackets for ferrets. A few
men like Mellors's mates, if Mellors had mates, selling night-shot videos about
catching pheasants and rabbits.
And an iphone on a water trough, in a sheep pen with straw
on the floor.
