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competitive advantage that set my genus apart from and above the spiteful, dumb beasts outside those wicker walls. First created, then tamed, man's red fire had allowed my woady forebears to prosper where other mammals could barely survive. It had seen them through ice ages and raw leftovers, catalysed the very process that defined the era I was here to experience.
    The fire was there to offer solace and displacement when the sheep rallied for a noisy and persistent assault on the rear wall, and when a moth the size of Dai's fist slammed blindly into my right temple. In more dwindled form, the hypnotic mind-balm applied by those flickering orange fingers helped me through the moment I grabbed hold of Wayne's flagon and felt a large slug being pulped in my grasp. I stayed until the scrumpy was drained, the last wooden tile no more than a fading ember. Then I tramped dolefully back to the roundhouse, pulled off my sweaty, smutted clothing, blundered on to the nearest haybale and lay there, feeling small things explore me and cursing myself for failing to anchor both arms around Wayne's departing ankles when I had the chance.
    I was boiling my morning bathwater when the film crew turned up. 'You all right there, mate?' breezed the sound man, who could have seen from some distance that I was not. I looked up from a one-handled saucepan of oily, brown water and showed him a matching face, one deeply lined with physical and spiritual exhaustion. 'Bad night, yeah?'
    It seemed best to respond with a shrug. Hard to imagine any Australian sympathising with my ovine ordeal. Particularly its most testing episode, wherein an apocalyptic overhead crash had propelled me from the hut at the break of dawn, nude and spear-wielding, to find that a sheep had somehow vaulted the stockade and was now grazing contentedly on my turfed roof. It had taken a direct hit with the scrumpy flagon to get him down, and in the chase that ensued to expel the repulsive beast out through the gate we'd disturbed a fox in the act of plundering Wayne's snack pantry.
    I hauled my steaming saucepan round the back and sluiced off at least some of the sweaty filth that is the lot of the excitable blacksmith's assistant. This was my debut experience of period bathing, and it laid out what would prove an enduring circular truth: historic body-dirt could only be shifted with a lot of hot water, a valued commodity whose onerous creation accumulated much additional historic body-dirt. Ergo, it was best not to bother. If you can't take the grime, don't do the time.
    When I returned, smeared and damp, Diane was standing before the camera whisking a twig in an earthenware pot of double cream. 'Do you hanker after days gone by, when Lycra didn't exist and the butter' – pause for theatrical pot-sniff – 'was real?'
    It was a matter of considerable relief when a hefty old Jeep clunked up and delivered a primitive technologist into my faltering prehistoric experience. Stubbled and down to earth in every sense, combat-trousered Karl Lee was an archaeologist who had made a name for himself as a hardcore practitioner of ancient survival skills.
    Before the film crew stole him – to his great credit Karl refused their insistent demands that he don one of Wayne's Caveman-at-C&A jerkins – he accompanied me for a walk through the woods. 'You've got ground ivy, comfret, wild raspberries, coltsfoot and beech nuts,' he said, scanning the vegetation. 'All perfectly edible. Acorns too, once you've boiled them to get rid of the tannin.' He stooped to snatch up a bramble leaf, then thrust it towards my mouth. In thrall to his manly certitude, I opened wide without protest: pleasantly nutty, if a little acid. Even better was the almost moreish wild garlic, and though Karl's subsequent harvest proved of diminishing appeal, I only spat out the beech leaves. 'Not that long ago, anyone could have walked through these trees and come out the other side with a meal,' sighed Karl as we marched