From Loretta:
As maybe one or two of you will recall, Tobias Smollett’s THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHREY CLINKER was one of the Important British Novels I never got around to reading .
Given my limited reading time, and how difficult it is to find all the details I want about early 19th C gondolas, I reckoned the chances of my reading this book very small indeed. 
It seemed far more likely that I would go out onto the high seas on a rubber raft searching for killer whales or traverse a suspension bridge high above a river that kills one or two people a year. The likelihood of my doing either of these things--given that, unlike my heroines, I am not Nature Girl or Country Girl or Adventure Girl--was, I confidently assumed, less than zero.
Um.
Here is a picture of me in my safety suit, preparatory to climbing into a large rubber-raft like thing called a zodiac boat. 
And here’s me on the suspension bridge at the killer river.
In short, for my spring break, I went to Vancouver, and acted like someone I’m not: Adventure Girl.
I had lots of fun, met some interesting people, and had a few surprises--like the day I wandered into the art museum and discovered a fabulous Canadian photographer.
One of the best parts, though, was being computer and email free for eight whole days. Oh, my husband took his laptop, but I tried that once last year, and it was like trying to type with my feet. No thanks. I was glad to kiss my computer good-bye.
To me, email is a blessing and a curse. It’s become a crucial part of my life; it’s made so many things easier--and yet it eats up so much of my life. It’s one of those inconvenient modern necessities.
So here is HUMPHREY CLINKER, which tells, not in email but in letters, what happens to Mr. Matthew Bramble’s family party as they travel through England and Scotland in about 1770. Mr. Bramble, a not-young bachelor, is something of a hypochondriac and a hypersensitive soul. But it seems to me that the way he views his world is very much the way I, coming from the 21st century, would view it.
For instance, when visiting Bath, I did wonder how those Georgians could all climb into the same big pool of hot water with other people who had every disease under the sun. Wasn’t anybody squeamish about this? Yes, Mr. Bramble was. He was thinking more or less what I was thinking: “We know not what sores may be running into the water while we are bathing, and what sort of matter we may thus imbibe; the king’s evil, the scurvy, the cancer, and the pox.”
OTOH, I did have happy images of milkmaids carrying their fresh milk through the streets of London. Mr. Bramble set me straight, reminding me that these were open pails of milk, “exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows...overflowings from mud carts, spatterings from coach wheels...” And that’s the clean part of the journey.
I’d assumed, too, that if one lives in a smelly world, one becomes inured to it. Not Mr. Bramble. He’s lived in Wales, on his idyllic estate (which sounds a lot like my Lithby Hall, in NOT QUITE A LADY), for most of his life. Accustomed to fresh country air and open spaces, he finds Bath suffocating and sickening: “Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, ointments, and embrocations, hungary-water, spirit of lavender, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile...such...is the fragrant aether we breathe in the polite assemblies of Bath.”
Very likely, were we to visit an assembly at Bath in 1771, we’d feel the same. Traveling anywhere in 1771, we’d all probably miss modern hygiene. And that would merely be the beginning of a very long list of things we’d miss from 21st century life.
But what wouldn’t we miss?
For my part, I wouldn’t be shedding any tears over my computer, email, phones, and car.
What about you? If you were to travel back in time, to the 18th or early 19th century, what modern (in)conveniences would you miss the least?