ANOTHER TIME ANOTHER PLACE BUT THE PLAGUE KNOWS NO BOUNDS!

Our  British government has now set in motion the business of compulsory face-covering in public places, particularly shops. Anyone who breaks the rule is liable to be fined.  What a long, strange journey we have come from 2 March when a mere half a dozen people were affected by the Covid-19 epidemic and, of course, from the 23 March official quarantine ruling.

Among my writerly pals, I've chronicled events as they occurred over the last four months and have written a handful of essays for some of my columns.  One feature looks back to 1939 when the government ruled that people should carry a gasmask in the strange little boxes that were provided. 

I've also reached back some 350 years to a tiny village in Derbyshire called Eyam where my research has linked me to the bubonic plague in 1665 which killed more than half the villagers and provided us with a seventeenth saviour by the name of William Mompesson. In just over a year, 260 of the village's inhabitants, from no fewer than 76 different families, had died. Historians have placed the total population of Eyam at between 350 and 800 before the plague struck. More to come. 

plague graves at Eyam church, Derbyshire

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