Romulus and Remus

As the UK gasps at the stupidity of a junior tax clerk putting 25 million families' most sensitive data in the post and losing it, I find myself once more reading the Olds, rather than the News; in fact, a most beautiful and spectacular find in Rome, the root of all modern-day government, the heart of the thread of fascism whose eagle emblem still sits atop the mightiest power.

Exploring deep under Emperor Augustus' palace on the Palatine hill, archaeologists have found the most remarkable, decorated cave, which appears to be a shrine built in the place most sacred to Rome, the place where twin brothers Romulus and Remus were suckled by the she-wolf who had rescued them from the river Tiber, where according to myth, they had been thrown, along with their mother, by an angry god.

But, surprising as it may seem, wolves and other animals raising feral human children is not myth - in particular, read the well-documented story of Kamala and Amala, indian children who were "rescued" by Reverend Joseph Singh in the early 20th century. He did his best to rehabilitate the girls, but as the commentary here notes, they constantly longed to return to their home in the wild and his efforts were sadly partial in their success.

Unlike our wolvish friends, I was raised in a series of council houses in the London Borough of Croydon by humans, but was always fascinated by the concept of being so intimately connected with nature, devouring books by Jack London, Gerald Durrell, Lyall Watson, anything which would re-connect me with the green world I felt was missing from our over-tidy and thoroughly corrupted lives. Standing illicitly on an Upper Norwood flat rooftop, on top of Crystal Palace hill, looking for miles over the rooftops of south London, I would frequently dream of the Great North Wood which had existed only 100 years previously, stretching across the entire south east of England from the coast to the Thames, imagining that the forest lurked beneath the tiles and tarmac. Somewhere around here, Romany charcoal burners still sent trails of smoke snaking through boughs of beech and birch. Small pockets of green remained, woodland glades now relegated to untidy Victorian parks. I would read endlessly of so-called primitive cultures whose learning in nature vastly exceeded our own, North American indians, far eastern and African cultures who maintained an intimacy with nature that we have lost. Even then I had the instinct that this was knowledge we needed more essentially than the academic progress we were supposed to be relying upon for our future survival.

We may be a nation of shopkeepers, but like Russian dolls, inside all of us is the smallholder, the grazer of animals on common land, the tribal and nomadic hunter-gather; and at our core, we are feral. The Romans knew this, and whilst they spread a scientific, civilising, centralising influence which exists to this day, they worshiped a religion with animism at its core, knowing that, in times of disaster, we resourceful humans might, like Romulus and Remus, find succour from even the wildest of predators.