Greetings from Aqua Sulis

Mayday always gives me a little thrill of excitement. It must be the pagan in me, because it has nothing to do with Socialism.

You have to be a virgin to dance around the Maypole. In the very old days, everyone in the village knew who was a virgin and who wasn't, but by the time Thomas Hardy came along nobody could be sure any longer, so they were obliged to have children perform the dance. These days they cannot even be sure about them, which probably explains why the May Pole is dying out on the village greens of England. In any event, the villages are now populated with wealthy ex-Londoners who laugh at the old country ways.

Where do you stand on Morris Dancing? I am part of the 99% of Brits who find them an embarrassment. Druids come a close second - well not all of them, just the ones who dress up in white sheets and clutter-up Stonehenge on the Solstices. I sort of understand what they are trying to do or celebrate, but ever since they were all but wiped out by the Romans on Anglesea, it has been guesswork of a very dubious and romantic kind.

The 17th and 18th century antiquaries were very keen to find out as much as they could about Druids, but the Romans were early masters of spin and the obliteration of history. They wrote the history because they could write, and they wrote that all Britons were savages. I am still protesting about that. Everything was written down for the Caesars, so we know pretty much everything there is to know on ancient Rome and its far-flung outposts of empire, down to the minutest detail.

Today I am cleaning the Roman Hermes and Dionysus marble figures - at the same time as I clean a Christian 'Calvary' tablet for a church. That sums-up May Day to me in a nutshell. Everyone is either hi-jacking the old and pasting the new over it, or just ignoring the past altogether and exclusively celebrating the present. It will be this way until the end of electricity.