Love In The Time Of Cholera

Evening all,

As this is my Valentine's day blip and being an old romantic i thought i'd bring you a blip concerning death and plague.

Also the more observant will notice i have moved away from a song title themed blip, to one with a more literary bent. A Gabriel Garcia Marquez classic i tend to think, there is a story all of its own about how i got introduced to Marquez's work, but that would be for another day.

Ok, these are the Riley graves situated in Eyam in derbyshire. Eyam is the small village that shut itself away when the plague arrived there in a flea infested bundle of cloth in 1665.

Having taken the decision to quarantine themselves the villagers of Eyam quietly suffered and went to their deaths.
Over the course of the next 14 months approx 270 of the 350 residents had died, and although the exact number of deaths vary, when outsiders finally entered the village they reported less than a quater of the residents alive.

These are the graves of the Hancock family, the matriach, Elizabeth Hancock had the tragic duty of burying her husband and her six children who all died within the space of one week in 1666. She buried them in a small enclosure in a field that they farmed (Riley being a corruption of a Norman word meaning King's Field)

and in that cruel but unsurprising twist that life throws up, Elizabeth Hancock,whether she wished to or not, was one of the few who survived the plague.

Happy Valentine's day, y'all!!!


Gabriel Garcia Marquez