Who is person of the millennium? Someone rather like me, I expect

THE BEST game in town at the moment (the Mandelson affair having reached a premature climax almost before the foreplay had begun) is one invented by Radio 4's Today programme. It's called "Personality of the Millennium", and listeners are invited to write or e-mail in, and vote for the man or woman who they think most deserves this accolade.

No firm criteria have been established, but various nobs have been asked their views. The Archbishop of Canterbury chose a martyred predecessor, Thomas Cranmer, while William Hague defied those who expected him to pick Pitt the Younger or John Major, and enterprisingly plumped for Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. Other grandees have penetrated the early morning chaos of kids, nappies, breakfast and ablutions to suggest Shakespeare and (did I dream it?) Pope John XXIII.

It is all, as the BBC's Peter Snow used to say when his by-election computer showed a potential Labour majority of 179 at the next election, "just a harmless bit of fun"; the equivalent of the "Lifetime services award" at the Oscars, where some popular has-been, no longer a threat to anyone, gets a big round of applause.

I would suggest that - at the end of the next millennium - we sharpen the thing up by awarding a large cash prize, or a trip to Alpha Centauri, to the winner. But fun or not, such exercises are very interesting for what they say about us. These may be forced and artificial choices, but they are choices nevertheless.

Let us return to that thought later, but imagine for the moment a meeting in a wintry hall somewhere in these isles exactly 1,000 years ago.

Over the beer and mead, as the chicken bones pile up on the mud floor, three men and one woman are playing the same game as us. They are: Brother Edgar, a tonsured monk of the Abbey of Whitby; Aethelwold, a wealthy thegn (or is he an ealdorman?); a blond, muscular Danish adventurer with a scarred face who answers to the name of Thorkil Thunderthighs, and "intermittently" a serving wench of dubious parentage, called Jutta.

The wind howls through the eaves as they all agree on one thing - it has been a very Dark Age. And they also accept Brother Edgar's one ground- rule, which is that Jesus himself is not a potential nominee. (Thorkil mutters that, by Odin, this is fine by him.) At first the thegn, Aethelwold is inclined towards Alfred the Great, on the basis that he united Saxon England, created a navy, defeated the Danes and translated Bede into Anglo- Saxon. Compared with the current apology for a monarch, Ethelred (25 years on the throne, and still not Ready), Alfred looks pretty good.

Thorkil snorts. If the Danes have been defeated, he demands, how come they run half of England? If he can't have the current Norse hero, Sweyn Forkbeard, then it's either Charlemagne of the Franks, or Erik the Red, discoverer of Greenland, for him. He does not know that - even as he quaffs - Erik's son, Leif, is sighting the coast of North America. Not that it matters, because nothing comes of it.

Brother Edgar has the advantage of a classical education. He dismisses Caesar Augustus partly for his paganism and partly for falling outside the scope of the competition by being born before Christ. Attila was, when all is said and done, just a Hun. Among kings, then, Edgar goes for Constantine the Great. But he urges the others to think about the contribution made by the Church to such European civilisation as can be said to exist. Without monasteries, would any great manuscripts have survived? Would the flame of culture not have been extinguished?

He is torn between St Benedict, and our very own Venerable Bede, whose Life of St Cuthbert, is, he tells a scoffing Thorkil, something of a modern classic. However, if push comes to shove, he's going to choose a bloke right from the very beginning of the millennium, good old Paul of Tarsus.

He is interrupted by the smashing of earthenware. Jutta, who has been alternately serving jugs of mead and offering her body to passing pedlars, has come over all premature feminist, and hurled a tray of beakers to the ground. How is it, she asks, that there are no women on their lists? What happened to Boudicca of the Iceni, or (of more recent provenance) Aethelflaeda, Queen of Mercia and Hammer of the Danes? Or even all those women of Byzantium, Rome, Ravenna and elsewhere, who had to keep the hearths warm and the bairns safe, while their menfolk went out and slew each other?

A post-coital pedlar, who has travelled a little, sympathises with Jutta, but keeps his council. Perhaps this would not be the best place to remind the company of that Arab prophet, Mohammed, and his dramatic impact on the modern world. And he's heard tell of India and far China, with their powders that go bang; huge walls that span continents, and fabulous wealth. But all that could all be rubbish. The pedlar himself cannot know that, across on the other side of the planet, on a peninsula later to be named Yucutan, there is a city called Chichen Itza, that is greater than almost any in the Western world.

He can't, but we can. In the thousand years that we survey retrospectively, most major happenings on Earth are known to us. Yet, as far as I can see, our inclinations and attitudes are nearly as parochial as those of the winter travellers of late 998. The emperors and philosophers of China do not appear on our lists, nor do the builders of great wonders in Central Asia. Poets who had the misfortune to write in Persian or Hindi fail to qualify. And Jutta's (admittedly ahistorical) pleas are still going unheard. Indeed, for the most part, we seem to believe that the competition was entitled "Male Anglophone Personality of the Millennium".

Insularity is quite an important part of the Anglophonic culture, and is taken to its extreme in the United States. I well remember meeting a representative of the United States Students Association in Weimar, East Germany in 1980. She was studying politics, but was unsure which country Moscow (where the Olympics were about to be held) was in. Was it Russia, she asked?

Given that this is so, it's a bit cheeky, this Personality of the Millennium lark. There is a good, democratic argument for saying that it's only valid if everybody from every country, who has lived during the last thousand years, is allowed to vote. So we should all be furnished with a copy of the entire second millennial electoral register, complete with full biographical details, and then permitted to make our choices.

On that basis let me now tell you who gets my vote for Personality of the Millennium - the one human being, born between 1000 and 2000 AD, who has made all the difference as far as I am concerned. And yes - it's me. Let me take a bow. Another middle-class, white, English-speaking male, I'm afraid. What about you?