Lustrum (IP) (With apologies to Robert Harris)

It is, or should be, a truth universally acknowledged that a world run by David Attenborough and Mary Beard would be a sane and civilised place and a much better bet than we have at the moment.  I forgive David his shameful flirting with Cameron Diaz on Graham Norton’s sofa, sadly and painfully resurrected amidst all the beautiful and dignified footage celebrating his ninetieth birthday.  And I forgive Mary her habit, in her latest television series, of introducing experts who don’t speak English and then not letting them say more than hello.  Even the divine have their foibles.

I’m two episodes in to Mary’s series on Imperial Rome, and one chapter in to the accompanying book, SPQR, which could be why I’m finding it hard to concentrate on my own rambling science fiction vision of a bunch of people and a bunch of androids on a bunch of planets in a bunch of trouble at some undefined bunching point in the future.  I have broken my own cardinal rule:  do not read good stuff while you’re creating.  Just do crosswords, word ladders and Zygolex (that’ll sort out readers of the i from the uninitiated) – you can kid yourself you’re working on your vocabulary and word skills.  If you must read, read rubbish.  It helps to convince you that Good God, if someone would publish that, they will publish yours.

Mary, of course, is out to show What The Romans Did For Us and also, Look, They’re Just Like Us.  They worried about immigrants from Syria.  They completely re-engineered the landscape around Seville to ensure there would be no break in olive oil production, without which the Empire could not feed itself, light itself or clean itself.  We all know about the roads, but Mary showed us a tall tankard engraved with Rome at the top and somewhere in Egypt, I think, at the bottom, and in between a list of all the places on the way, with mileage.  In other words, what you used to get from the AA before the curse of satnav.  But just when you’re feeling all warm and fuzzy towards the Romans, Mary informs you that going to the slave market at Ephesus was like doing a big shop at Tesco’s.  They looked for bargains.  They were on the hunt for BOGOFs and sales.  And a memorial engraving to a dead four year old child described him as a miner.  One of those with picks and shovels, not a precious little thing with his whole life ahead of him.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that now and again the Romans felt in need of the odd bit of purification of their buildings, animals, landscape and the general body politic.  Mary hasn’t got to this bit yet, either on the telly or in the book, but after every census they held a lustration, a ceremony of purification, done in the name of the Roman people.  As the census was taken every five years, the period in between was referred to as the lustrum, which was then adopted as a general name for a five year period.   Robert Harris also adopted it for one of the volumes in his Cicero series. 

As with a lot of Roman stuff, it lingers.  Lustration is the name given to the purging of officials, at whatever time interval, in the old Communist regimes of Eastern Europe.  The Latin root, lustro/lustrare, also had a figurative meaning, illuminate, giving us our word ‘lustre’.  Unlike ‘decade’ (OK, I know that was Greek originally) we no longer use it to denote a period of time, which is odd really, seeing how keen we have been to absorb the generally more menacing ‘five year plan’ into our vocabulary.  I did wonder if the idea of a purification, a cleansing of the spirit, formed a high minded reason for the maximum length of a British parliament being five years, but apparently not.  Our parliaments lasted seven years until the rules changed in 1911. 

Every so often it seems as though we have been through a bit of a purification, that the old dark ways have been swept aside and a new horizon is in view.  I think my parents felt like that with the election of the Labour government in 1945, and the world seemed for a brief moment to turn its face to the sun with the election of JFK.  The sun, the moon and the stars seemed to have come out in the early hours of 2 May 1997, when Michael Portillo’s smacked-arse face told us that it was actually going to happen, and the only regret was that Thatcher was not there to be defeated by the people’s vote.  And, just under nine years ago now, Beyonce sang At Last and we thought yes, at bloody last, America has chosen a black guy, one with a funny name to boot, to be in the White House.

I don’t know who was in charge of those lustration ceremonies, but they obviously got the procedure wrong.  Kennedy shovelled American troops into Vietnam and lied through his teeth.  Portillo got his arse smacked, but the Bullingdon club is now rampaging its revenge through our country, helped on its way by the anger and disgust the nation feels about the illegal, slithering, blood-caked machinations of Tony Blair.  I know that his Labour government did produce a lot of good stuff in the early days, and I am grateful that I was a single parent of young children during that time and not in the era that preceded it or the one we have now.   But wrong is wrong, however much right may have gone before. 

Obama is one of the few who has kept his personal integrity intact, but the frustration and anger in America at the stolid impotence of a gridlocked political machine is producing what the rest of the world is viewing with slack-jawed incredulity:  a guy who makes Boris Johnson look like David Attenborough may be next President of the United States. 

I am going to resist drawing parallels between the Roman memorial to a four year old miner and a photograph of a dead Syrian child on a Turkish beach, because we see the dead Syrian child as an aberration and a tragedy and, as far as we can tell, the Romans saw nothing particularly unusual in a child either being a miner or getting killed doing it.  Also, although modern slavery is alive and well in this country, it too is seen as an aberration and a tragedy and Tesco is not, as far as I am aware, opening a new set of shelves with the possibility of extra Clubcard points.  But don’t you just wish that once in a while, maybe at the beginning of every new fixed term five year Parliament, we would accept that there is a need to purify, in the best sense of the word, our national life, our politics, and ourselves?  To do something that would acknowledge all the bad stuff, all the tragedy that we could have avoided, if we had had the will. 

And then give Mary and David the keys to everything.