I was staring at the denuded milk shelves the other day, and found myself if this is how it felt to be Romano-British in the 400s. One day the flour wasn't on the shelves. The next olives were in short supply. Perhaps the price of garum had risen, or dormice weren't to be had without a trip into Camulodunum or Dorchester. A few odd things not being available now and then, or price rises in the basics turned into permanent absences; roads started to deteriorate; Saturnalia cards turned up late, then not at all. Those nice Gallic carpenters weren't to be found. The filthy habit of drinking beer returned as the locals couldn't get hold of good Roman wine and reverted to their great-grandparents' ways. All of a sudden, perhaps when you were stripping the roof off the forum to repair your villa, you realised you hadn't heard from your cousins in Hispanic for a while, or had a tax bill. And then it hit you: you weren't Roman any more, and life was going to get a lot harder.
Not that life - now and then - wasn't already hard for many (slaves, the unemployed, the low-paid). But it's funny and depressing to notice how quickly the inmates of Brexit Island have adjusted to and found excuses for the slow degradation of our way of life (and not just standards in public life). Random shortages in the shops, the poor state of the roads (very noticeable to a cyclist like me), rapidly rising prices, dirty air and water, fewer, more expensive trains and buses, rationed healthcare and a plan to educate fewer people …all being blamed on coronavirus or dismissed for now, but all clearly the products of a society that's failed to plan, that has Whiggishly assumed that Progress means permanent improvement, and that believes Alone is somehow Better.
I don't really know what it felt like to become a post-Roman (though I know someone who does) but I'm reminded of Hemingway on how you go bankrupt 'two ways: gradually then suddenly'. This place has cut itself off from a major trading and diplomatic bloc; the young workers who funded the old are leaving; the poor are being made poorer; a government with neither competence nor honour is retreating into nationalistic cliché while the serious money is hidden offshore. I dimly remember Gibbon noting in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that while (out of both altruism and self-preservation) the rich initially provided bread and circuses, whereas at the end they built higher walls and hired more security guards to protect their plutocratic luxuries - the Roman version of the Panama Papers, offshore shell companies and mega-mansions with underground swimming pools co-existing with full-time care staff going to food banks. I can't help thinking of Rishi Sunak, who proceeded from an expensive private school to Oxford and thence to hedge fund trading and marriage to a billionaire, before entering politics to spend the taxes he dedicated his life to avoiding, on behalf of people whose lives he has never encountered and couldn't imagine.
I suspect neither you nor I will experience the extremes of poverty or plutocracy, and the effects of - for instance - deliberately restricting university education to fewer people (what nation has ever conceived of a less-educated populace as the answer to anything?) but it's hard not to miss the everyday signs of decay, from potholes to missing pints of milk. The question is whether we're experiencing temporary spasms or the start of a long, slow decline.
As any casual glance at recent history tells you, the popular response is rarely progressive: if the rot really has set in, expect an extension of the cynical, cheap politics we're currently experiencing and outbreaks of bitter, violent paranoia.
I'll stop there. I've depressed myself. Again.
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