fed me from the porridge drawer and dyed my clothes in wee, you could have locked me up in Cinderbury for a year with only the Time Tarts and those sheep for company, you could have done all that and still I'd never have made it to the Iron Age. My clock just couldn't be turned back that far.
The night before John had railed at length against a distant BBC historical-reality show in which a couple of dozen me-type urbanites were left to cope alone in an Iron Age village in Wales. Describing the consequent shambles, he'd rhetorically wondered what the series was attempting to prove. 'You were just watching people without any period skills faffing about – any Iron Ager would have known that if you cook chicken in the dark, you'll end up with food poisoning. We didn't learn anything about their period at all.'
Perhaps not, but we learned a little about ours. Mainly that most of us in the developed world have mislaid all the fundamental talents that were once hardwired human nature, but which in the space of a breathless couple of centuries have been rendered utterly irrelevant. Appraising my least ridiculous cloak-brooch, John diplomatically commented how difficult it was to master tools and crafts that had played no part in one's formative years. And there we were: I was simply too modern, too pampered and closeted, all that ancient know-how jettisoned in favour of more contemporary life-skills, like digital copyright theft and sarcasm.
Yet there was hope, and it lay just beyond those wooden walls. Buried out there were the remains of a structure that would have astounded Cinderbury Man perhaps more than the phone mast erected beside it 2,000 years later. The invaders that built it brought with them the sophisticated technology and culture that would at last haul our filthy forebears towards civilisation as I recognised it. They were, in short, the kind of people I might more convincingly pretend to be.
Chapter Two
They pioneered our urban way of life, and left behind vast lumps of epic civil engineering. They conquered a huge swathe of the known world with their winning blend of ruthless tactical efficiency, big catapults and splendid helmets. They lived it large, and wrote about it. Everything that Wayne felt the Iron Age lacked, the Romans had in shiny spades. No surprise that, in contrast to the dearth of prehistoric re-enactors, the problem now was an overwhelming surfeit.
Britain alone hosts more than a dozen very active Roman groups, most with a military bias, some boasting over 100 members and a history stretching back to the sixties. Germany is another stronghold. Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Holland, Russia, Australia, Venezuela . . . no matter how far I cast my Google net, it came back with a haul of sandalled legionaries. Shamed by their subsequent decline, or just bored with an era whose relics cluttered their city centres, Italy could muster only one mothballed group; indeed it seemed that the Romans were most popular in those countries they had either failed to annex in totality or never even knew existed. Perhaps inspired by Hollywood's enduring fascination with the era, no fewer than twenty-one practising legions patrolled the United States. The Legio XIV had declared Buffalo, New York, a 'formally recognised province of Rome'; I watched in silent awe a YouTube video depicting period military drill solemnly performed in a Las Vegas parking lot.
Aware that soldierly lifestyles were likely to dominate many of my forthcoming re-enactments, I spent some time tracking down civilian-oriented Roman groups, pretending I was doing so in search of a more rounded experience, rather than just to avoid pain and humiliation. Fruitlessly so. Hope was raised by a post in livinghistory.co.uk's Roman section headed 'For those inclined to gentler pursuits', then dashed by the message beneath: 'We always need body draggers, arena guards and someone to portray Pluto ushering the fallen into the afterlife.' Of all the
The night before John had railed at length against a distant BBC historical-reality show in which a couple of dozen me-type urbanites were left to cope alone in an Iron Age village in Wales. Describing the consequent shambles, he'd rhetorically wondered what the series was attempting to prove. 'You were just watching people without any period skills faffing about – any Iron Ager would have known that if you cook chicken in the dark, you'll end up with food poisoning. We didn't learn anything about their period at all.'
Perhaps not, but we learned a little about ours. Mainly that most of us in the developed world have mislaid all the fundamental talents that were once hardwired human nature, but which in the space of a breathless couple of centuries have been rendered utterly irrelevant. Appraising my least ridiculous cloak-brooch, John diplomatically commented how difficult it was to master tools and crafts that had played no part in one's formative years. And there we were: I was simply too modern, too pampered and closeted, all that ancient know-how jettisoned in favour of more contemporary life-skills, like digital copyright theft and sarcasm.
Yet there was hope, and it lay just beyond those wooden walls. Buried out there were the remains of a structure that would have astounded Cinderbury Man perhaps more than the phone mast erected beside it 2,000 years later. The invaders that built it brought with them the sophisticated technology and culture that would at last haul our filthy forebears towards civilisation as I recognised it. They were, in short, the kind of people I might more convincingly pretend to be.
Chapter Two
They pioneered our urban way of life, and left behind vast lumps of epic civil engineering. They conquered a huge swathe of the known world with their winning blend of ruthless tactical efficiency, big catapults and splendid helmets. They lived it large, and wrote about it. Everything that Wayne felt the Iron Age lacked, the Romans had in shiny spades. No surprise that, in contrast to the dearth of prehistoric re-enactors, the problem now was an overwhelming surfeit.
Britain alone hosts more than a dozen very active Roman groups, most with a military bias, some boasting over 100 members and a history stretching back to the sixties. Germany is another stronghold. Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Holland, Russia, Australia, Venezuela . . . no matter how far I cast my Google net, it came back with a haul of sandalled legionaries. Shamed by their subsequent decline, or just bored with an era whose relics cluttered their city centres, Italy could muster only one mothballed group; indeed it seemed that the Romans were most popular in those countries they had either failed to annex in totality or never even knew existed. Perhaps inspired by Hollywood's enduring fascination with the era, no fewer than twenty-one practising legions patrolled the United States. The Legio XIV had declared Buffalo, New York, a 'formally recognised province of Rome'; I watched in silent awe a YouTube video depicting period military drill solemnly performed in a Las Vegas parking lot.
Aware that soldierly lifestyles were likely to dominate many of my forthcoming re-enactments, I spent some time tracking down civilian-oriented Roman groups, pretending I was doing so in search of a more rounded experience, rather than just to avoid pain and humiliation. Fruitlessly so. Hope was raised by a post in livinghistory.co.uk's Roman section headed 'For those inclined to gentler pursuits', then dashed by the message beneath: 'We always need body draggers, arena guards and someone to portray Pluto ushering the fallen into the afterlife.' Of all the
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