Plague - Bubonic, Covid?

I haven’t been to Eyam, but I believe it to be beautiful and interesting. It is on my bucket list of places to visit. Eyam is a small village in the Derbyshire Peak District which worked hard to be self-contained during an outbreak of a highly infectious disease.

Taken from ‘The Plague in Eyam ’ by George May,

“The plague which was a highly infectious and very unpleasant disease widely known in Britain and Europe, came to Eyam in the summer of 1665, possibly in a bale of cloth brought up from London. The people in the house where it came to, caught the disease and died in a short space of time. Before long, others had caught the disease and also died, after a short and very painful illness. It spread rapidly. The local rector, The Rev. William Mompesson and his predecessor, led a campaign to prevent the disease spreading outside the village to the surrounding area. This involved the people of the village remaining in the village and being supplied with necessary provisions by people outside.

the boundary stone

                                                            
"There is still on the outskirts of the village a location called the Boundary stone, where traditionally money was placed in small holes for the provisions which those from the local area brought for the villagers. As a result of this action, the disease did not spread, but almost a third of the villagers died. Interestingly some of the villagers who were in contact with those who caught the plague, did not catch it. This was because they had a chromosome which gave them protection. This same chromosome has been shown to still exist in those who are direct descendants of those who survived the plague, and who are still living in the village at the present time. The action of the villagers in staying in the village is almost unique and makes the village the place of significance that it is.”

The nursery rhyme Ring-a-ring-of-roses is thought to have come from this event.

We had to apply a similar process during the Covid lockdown, by relying on grocery deliveries and isolating ourselves as much as possible. I will forever, keep to social distancing when possible and be mindful of handwashing and disinfecting.

Here's poet laureate, Simon Armitage,

Lockdown

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas

in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth

in ye old Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see

the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,

thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.

Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,

star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line

whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.

But slept again,
and dreamt this time

of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,

a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,

streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,

embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,

bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,

the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,

the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,

the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so.

                            Simon Armitage, 2020

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Waking Up In Paradise

Take it from me. Waking up in paradise is not all it's cracked up to be, especially after a night like the one I'd just experienced on Saturday 31st August 1974!

There weren't many people willing to risk a holiday in the eastern Mediterranean that summer, for there was a war being fought between the Greeks and the Turks over on the island of Cyprus. Fighting had commenced in mid-July when the Turks invaded and was waged over several tense weeks, so the official advice was that Cyprus, Greece and Turkey were destinations best avoided. Holiday companies cancelled packages and airlines pulled flights, but some intrepid back-packers were not to be put off.

My girlfriend and I with minimal light clothing, books which required reading before the next university term, and our orange tent, flew off to dusty Crete with a fistful of drachmas and our dreams of a Greek vacation that we'd refused to contemplate during the years that the country's recently ousted military junta had been in power.

It was while we were staying in Aghios Nikolaos that we were told about Vai, a palm beach paradise about 80km (50 miles) away, right at the eastern-most tip of Crete, well worth a visit. One bus a day made the journey and we decided to head off there for the week-end.

After the town of Siteia, we were the only passengers left on the (non-air-conditioned) old bus as it wove its precarious way along the dusty coast road to land's end in the full heat of a blistering Saturday afternoon, but Vai, when we arrived, was breathtakingly beautiful: a curving half-moon bay of golden sand fringed by groves of date palms. The only habitation was an old bar/taverna set back among the trees and we were surprised to find it open, given there was hardly anyone around.

We went for a dip to cool off, then found a place to pitch the tent beneath the palms before heading over to the taverna. Could we eat? Yes, but they only had moussaka on offer. My girlfriend took one look at it and decided to stick to beer (and later some bread, cheese and peaches that we'd brought with us). Me, I went for the moussaka with my beer - a decision I was later to regret.

palm fringed beach at Vai, Crete (1974)

We read for a while in the late afternoon, took another dip in the sea and walked hand in hand on the edge of the sand the entire length of the bay and back without seeing another soul. The bar/taverna was closed and the owner departed (presumably to the nearby village of Palaikastro). It seemed we were alone in paradise.

By the way, for those of you (the majority I guess) who have never been to Vai, you might have witnessed it unknowingly as the back-drop to a TV advertisement from the 1980s featuring the Bounty chocolate bar ("Try a little tenderness - Bounty, the taste of paradise"). Of course the makers of the advertisement had cheated. The palm trees at Vai are date palms, not coconut palms, so the crew had to bring along their own bag of coconuts for the shoot. Still, it was a cheaper location than a proper tropical island.

It was very peaceful as the sun began to set behind the palm grove. The stillness was uncanny, the sea was silent, the air hot with not a breath of wind and as the sky shaded from flaming red to dark blue, I was reminded very strongly of my childhood in West Africa, those familiar date palms, the fact that sunsets don't hang around and darkness falls suddenly. We retired to our tent.

I don't know if it was the lightning flashes, the crashes of thunder, the tattoo of rain on our tent or the fact that my every bone ached that woke me first in the middle of the night. However, I soon realised that I was going to be violently sick, so unzipping the mosquito flap I crawled out into the storm and retched up moussaka and beer until there was nothing left inside me, or so I thought. Food poisoning! Re-heated meat. Nature's way of purging the system. Soaking wet but somewhat relieved, I dived back into the tent and tried to find a comfortable position to lie in. Impossible. In fact I had to crawl into the storm twice more, and felt I must have turned myself inside out, before the nausea abated and the thunderclouds rolled away. I ached all over, couldn't get comfortable and decided this was the most wretched I had ever felt.

I might have slept for an hour or so, I'm not really sure. At just after six the sun rose out of the sea on a beautiful September Sunday morning. The air was clear, the palms dripped and glistened, the water sparkled and I stumbled weakly down to the shore to sit very still feeling sorry for myself, and waited for the sun to warm me. 

curving half-moon bay at Vai, Crete (1974)

Of course I was dehydrated, light-headed and slightly feverish, certainly in no fit state to properly appreciate the beauty of the scene, but then something really strange happened. As I sat there an hour past sunrise on that deserted beach people began walking towards me along the shoreline, people that I knew. They weren't dressed for the beach, that's for sure. One was my best friend from school in sub-fusc jacket, tie and charcoal trousers. Another was the first girl I'd ever had sex with. Another was the mate I regularly went cycling with. He didn't have his bike with him.

Of course I knew this couldn't be real, especially as the girl had died rather tragically on account of drugs a couple of years before. A ghost perhaps? And was my school friend then also dead? And my cycling companion? It turned out later not to be the case, but as they continued to walk towards me these chimeras seemed as real as my girlfriend, standing outside the tent calling to ask if I was feeling any better. Then after a few disconcerting minutes more, my shimmering friends just dematerialised, leaving an empty shoreline. I suppose I had been hallucinating. It was truly the weirdest, most unsettling thing I've ever known. Have any of you perhaps experienced anything similar? I'd be interested to hear the circumstances. The mind is a curious device!

Once the bar/taverna opened I rehydrated cautiously during the morning with bottles of lemonade, though didn't feel up to eating anything. We decided to pack up the tent and ride out of paradise on the daily bus back to Siteia and a few nights in a pension with clean sheets and hot showers, a more practical form of paradise.

I was reminded of that morning in Vai over twenty years later when watching the movie 'Contact' while on a flight to San Francisco. If you know the film (starring Jodie Foster as astronomer Ellie Arroway) there is a famous scene where she travels through time and space and finds herself on a deserted beach and her father walks towards her - all illusion but not hallucination in that instance. The parallel resonated.

Nowadays at Vai there's probably a metalled road, a car-park, several buses a day, a choice of bars/tavernas, a supermarket and rows of sunbeds all along the beach. I'm not interested in going back there. I'll just treasure the memory (food-poisoning, hallucinations and all). 

I did plan a poem to accompany this blog but I'm really not convinced of its merits, so I've removed it.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Saturday Solitude

Welcome to Saturday Blog #250 on the subject of solitude, which most dictionaries (reasonably enough) define as a state of being alone, both mentally and physically. Some definitions elaborate, listing isolation, seclusion, a sense of being cut off, existing in a lonesome place. Few of them are pejorative (i.e. with a connotation that solitude is bad or unhealthy) and yet it does seem to be the consensus that solitude for any length of time is an unnatural state for human beings - as social animals - to be in.

I rather think it depends on where one is in the arc of life and on how much choice is involved in the matter (among other factors). Children absolutely need adults and like having other children around them. It's how they feel secure and how they learn, including how to socialise. I didn't experience much of the latter (other children to play with) as a youngster in a mission house on the edge of an African village, which possibly accounts for my somewhat reserved manner and the fact that I am perfectly happy with my own company for long periods of time, having got used to it from an early age.

That said, I've actually been in long-term relationships (co-habitations or marriages) for the majority of my adult life and I've only actually lived on my own, here in the house on the strand, for the last six years of that span. Being intimately close with someone all the time has its delights and of course its drawbacks. Living on my own has certainly proved less stressful than the emotional rollercoaster of the previous ten years with a high-maintenance spouse. I don't know that I will always live on my own from now; but whatever transpires, I think I shall always want recourse to a certain amount of personal space/solitude as a matter of choice - it's the healthy option.

For the very old, those whose life partner and perhaps the majority of their friends have passed away, isolation and its concomitant sense of loneliness or desertion is a serious challenge to the very quality of life. I re-watched the sci-fi movie Contact the other night, Carl Sagan's story starring Jodie Foster as the single-minded astronomer searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence among the millions of galaxies, billions of stars and trillions of planets populating the omniverse. As I've commented before in blogs on the theme of 'Are we alone?' either intelligent civilisations are ten a penny out there or we're unique - and someone in the movie remarks at one point to the effect: "Supposing all we have is each other."

Indeed. Maybe that should be our guiding principle unless/until proved otherwise and the acid test of our success or failure as a 'caring' society.

And so finally to this week's piece of politically pointed poetic allegory, fresh from the imaginarium and prefaced by an epigraph from Rumi's Spiritual Verses. Once again, I'm not sure if this is its final form but it will have to serve for now:

I am his servant who at every hostel
does not claim he's enlightened at the table.

And many's the hostel must be left behind
so that one day the man will reach his home.

Scintilla
The rates are cheap,
room service non existent
in this Hotel of Lost Souls
and so here we all are, ensconced
each in our own drear, dysfunctional lives
yet having this in common -
the poet, the priest, the alchemist and courtesan,
mechanic, logician, painter and musician,
nurse and teacher, the merchant and the sage -
our isolating, stultifying fear.

We hardly greet each other
if we pass upon the stairs,
guarded eyes cast down for worry
of giving anything away,
some spark of recognition,
a complicity which might betray us
to the dark informers in our midst
and leave us prey to undercover soldiers
and those rabid politicians who rage
against all better instincts.

It doesn't have to be this way.
We need to search inside,
re-find and nurture that bright spark
which fired us all upon our chosen path,
check out of this third rate
accommodation to an austere status quo
and boldly go together
where our moral compass leads,
lighting by example so others can follow
the route to a more fulfilling tomorrow.

Thanks for reading. Don't forget to register to vote! Until next time, S ;-)

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