Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant. To me this was, and remains, an amazement: the idea of a man in a toga, standing on what is now the edge of my land, patting himself all over, and realizing with consternation that he has lost his treasured keepsake, which then lay in the soil for seventeen or eighteen centuries - through endless generations of human activity; through the rise of the English language, the birth of the English nation, the development of continuous monarch and all the rest - before finally being picked up by a late-twentieth-century farmer, presumably with a look of consternation of his own.
( Bill Bryson )
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