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Diary

01 February 2013

ISTOCK

A JUNIOR Health Minister, Anna Soubry, has caused a stir by declaring that you can tell if someone is rich or poor by how fat they are. It is true: the shoppers in Waitrose look different from those in Iceland, and it is obvious that cheap food, especially of the "Buy One Get One Free" variety, is the rubbish that never goes off - Pringles, Kit Kats, etc. But fresh food can be cheap, especially in markets, where you see immigrant families stuffing their bags full of cut-price fruit and veg.

The real problem is the lack of an embedded British cooking culture - knowing about food and what to do with it. The decline began here: Victorian London glittered with produce from all over the Empire, but the working poor (especially women) who lived in slums with no kitchens or gardens had no choice but to eat debased, synthetic food.

Margarine, along with tea, white bread, and white sugar, became the stuff of life for millions. Other countries, slower to industrialise, held on to their food memories longer. Today, any French teenager still knows how an omelette (the ultimate in cheap, fast food) is made, and will have eaten many in his or her lifetime; but I would be surprised if half the children in England would recognise one, let alone eat it.

But middle-class horror of the "self-indulgent" food tastes of the working classes is nothing new. As ever, the clear-sighted and plain-speaking George Orwell nailed it, in The Road to Wigan Pier.

"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. When you are harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull, wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'."

EXCITING may not be the first word you would think of to describe Latin, but it does have its thrills. I am not talking about my old Latin mistress, a spinster in her 60s, who took to wearing see-though leopard-skin-print blouses - presumably to get us to focus more closely on Kennedy's Latin Primer - but about the thrill of decoding something tricky, or reading an ancient author in his own language (still possible for GCSE Latin).

And where modern languages deal with the banalities of everyday life, such as how to catch a train, go to the shops, or order a meal, Latin gets straight in there with the sex and violence. The Cambridge Latin Course kicks off with the death of an entire family at Pompeii, passes blithely through executions, torture, and poisonings, and finally arrives, for Year 10 pupils, at the persecution and suicide of the Jews at Masada in AD 73. Nice people, the Romans.

As for sex, it is all lascivious slave girls or spoiled matrons. The Cambridge Latin Course paints a picture of Rome (probably accurate) as a macho and misogynistic society with good plumbing. No wonder my (female) pupils sometimes shriek with horror at what they are being asked to translate.

But every now and then we come across a reading that leaves me gaping, but the girls completely unmoved - our differing reactions being a precise indicator of our respective ages. These are the bits in which Romans writers talk about the early Christians.

For my secular, relativist pupils, there is nothing special about these passages, but for me, raised on tales of saints and martyrs, it is gobsmacking to see the whole thing from the other side, and to dis- cover that the people I was taught to think of as wicked heathens were actually quite thoughtful and nice and did not really want to hurt anyone.

Pliny, for instance, is a genial sort of cove who is sent off to govern a province on the Black Sea, and finds himself having to deal with a number of pesky Christians. As far as he can see, they are not doing much harm. But, as he writes to his employer, the Emperor Trajan, he knows he has to keep things running smoothly. He cannot have some weird religion stirring anything up.

So, if the members of this "degenerate cult" persist in meeting in secret, calling their leader God, and refusing to worship the Emperor, even after Pliny has given them several chances to stop being so silly, well, he is sorry, but he has to cut their heads off. You can see his point.

Ditto Tacitus, a historian, writing about Nero. Nero blames the Christians for the Great Fire of Rome, but that's OK, Tacitus says, as they are already hated by everyone for their "abominations" - i.e. cannibalism. (Well, if you go around talking about eating the body of Christ, you must expect the logical Romans to assume the worst.)

"This mischievous superstition", Tacitus writes, "was briefly checked by the death of its leader, Christus, at the sentence of Pontius Pilate, but then broke out again, not only in Judea, the source of the malignancy, but also in Rome, where all things evil and shameful congregate and find a following."

Bracing, isn't it? But it does you good to question your certainties - and Latin is surprisingly good for that.
 

TO COME back to the whole thin/fat thing again: are you one of the many people on the 5:2 fasting diet? That's the one where you fast for two non-consecutive days a week, and eat "normally" (whatever that means) for the remaining five days. Everyone I know is on it, and being very holier-than-thou about it.

But, apparently, like all other diets, this one is doomed to failure unless you are doing it for religious reasons. It has been suggested that those whose abstinence from food is part of a spiritual quest will fast more successfully than those who are doing it for vanity.

So that's me off the hook, then. I am not sure what I believe now, and, whatever it is, I do not feel strongly enough to give up two whole days' worth of food for it. Those Romans have a lot to answer for. And anyway, I'm with George Orwell on this one - I'm off to put the kettle on and have a nice piece of cake.
 

Oenone Williams lives in Salisbury with her five children and a hus-band who sings in the cathedral choir.

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