The Paninis of Pompeii. Andy Stanton

the richest men alive. And you might be thinking to yourself that this is why he was so fat, you know, because he was always eating fancy foods and having toffees between mealtimes. But shame on you if you thought that. Caecilius was actually a fairly sensible eater, he just had a glandular problem.

      Caecilius and his family lived in the town of Pompeii. Can you see how there’s two ‘i’s at the end of the end of ‘Pompeii’ when surely one would be enough? The Ancient Romans were so rich and wasteful that they didn’t even care how many letters they used! Nowadays we’re far more careful with the way we use our letterssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss­sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss­sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

       LIFE IN POMPEII

      Pompeii was a very nice town, there were some impressive buildings and public spaces and a man who could make amazing animal noises simply by getting an animal and pulling its tail really hard – but there was one problem with living there. You see, there was a big volcano right next door to it.

      ‘I don’t like the look of that volcano,’ said Caecilius one morning, looking out the window by standing near the window and pointing his face in the right direction and looking out the window. ‘It could go off at any moment.’

      ‘Mother,’ said Filius, who was a bright and curious child, ‘what is the name of that volcano?’

      ‘No one knows,’ replied Vesuvius, ‘but your father is quite correct about it being a terrible menace. Only the other day I saw some pizzas come flying out of it. And quite a few Mirror-Men into the bargain.’

      ‘Not those blasted Mirror-Men again, there seem to be more of them every year,’ said Caecilius. ‘Filius, my boy, can you go and fetch my sandals, I forgot to bring them inside and I’m afraid they’re being eaten, or worn, by dogs.’

      So Filius went to collect his father’s sandals and while he did so, he thought about the Mirror-Men and about all the other inventions that the Romans had come up with. You see, the Romans were very clever people indeed and they had invented lots of things that we still use today, including: central heating; baths; frogs; roads; pencils with rubbers on the end; Mirror-Men; Mirror-Men with central heating; Mirror-Men with rubbers on the end; frogs with central heating; baths with Mirror-Men sitting in them; roads covered with pencils and frogs; aqueducts; aqueducts filled with Mirror-Men pencils with rubbers on the end; spears; spears with rubbers on the end; Mirror-Men eating spears and frogs; volcanoes; pizzas; pizzas erupting out of volcanoes; pizzas erupting out of frogs; frogs erupting out of pizzas; roads with central heating; Mirror-Men sitting on a giant pizza erupting out of a volcano, near a frog; baths but when you turn on the tap, pencils come out instead of water; togas (which were a kind of robe that everyone wore) and toga-rones (which were a kind of robe made of chocolate and instead of taking it off when you went to bed you just ate it and a new one grew back the next day, I think).

      Some of the inventions were useful (e.g. pencils with rubbers on the end) and some were brilliant (e.g. pizzas and frogs) and some were terrible (e.g. volcanoes) and some were a mixture of brilliant and terrible (e.g. pizzas erupting out of volcanoes, because someone could get hurt. Or even if they didn’t, even if the pizza didn’t land on you and burn your face off, even if it landed on the ground, would you want to eat a pizza that had landed on the ground? At the very least it would be quite dusty) and some were just no one really understood them at all (e.g. Mirror-Men).

      Most of the time it was brilliant being a Roman because the Holy Roman Empire ruled the world and if you were a Roman you were allowed to do an army and go to any country you liked and kick people. But some of the inventions were more trouble than they were worth. They had gotten out of hand.

      The Mirror-Men in particular were very bothersome. One night Caecilius was having a bath and he found about thirty of the things sitting in there holding pencils with rubbers on the end. The next night there were more like forty Mirror-Men in there with him and the night after that there were nearly seventy thousand. There were so many Mirror-Men that Caecilius could hardly fit in the tub to have a bath and he just had to lick himself clean like a cat, or an ice cream that has somehow learned to eat its own body to survive. And to make matters worse, while he was licking himself clean, a nearby volcano (not the main one, but another one) exploded in a shower of pizzas, frogs, central heating, roads, aqueducts and yet more Mirror-Men.

      ‘Drat and figs!’ yelled Caecilius, kicking the bathtub out of the window and into the garden, where it landed on Caecilius’s head, even though he was actually the one standing in the bathroom who had kicked the bathtub out of the window in the first place so I don’t know how that happened, probably just physics wasn’t very proper in those times.

      ‘Ow!’ cried Caecilius, rubbing his head with a pencil with a rubber on the end. You’d think the rubber would be good for rubbing his head, but actually it started erasing it.

      ‘This day is going from bad to worse!’ yelled Caecilius. ‘Everything exploding all the time! Mirror-Men everywhere! And now I’ve erased most of my own head!’

      So that’s what life in Roman Times was like. Good, but they had their problems.

       CAECILIUS AND BARKUS WOOFERINICUM

      Now, Caecilius’s son Filius had a dog whom he’d found in a bath one day, and this scraggy devil went by the name of Barkus Wooferinicum. He had a horrid pointed snout and you could see his ribs poking through. Caecilius didn’t trust Barkus Wooferinicum but Filius loved him so the dog stayed. Mostly he slept out on the streets.

      One morning, Caecilius got up at dawn to try to get the best bargains on the farts at the market, and this is where the phrase ‘the early Caecilius gets the fart’ comes from. He got out of bed, fondly stroked Vesuvius’s hair and put on his toga, sandals and Julius Caesar pendant.

      Then he jumped out of the window on to the street below and broke both his legs.

      ‘Ouch,’ said Caecilius, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that.’

      Caecilius took out his magic charm, which had been given to him by a dirty rabbit, and spoke the words:

      ‘Go back in time, go back in time, go back in time, that’s what I want to do.’

      Immediately the magic