I've read more than my fair share of accounts of the Black Death. The ones specializing in England always liked to emphasize how, even to this day, there are deserted places with just a hollowed out church, where a village used to live. Which, in this "modren" age, I always asked, "well, where???" Ha... how about here.

I'm sure everyone in the UK grew up living with this stuff. I'm fascinated by it, but in such a horribly sad way. A thousand year old church, with wind blowing through the hollow spaces, because all the parishioners died just two hundred years later. And now a farmer's combine grumbles past it, because it's easier than knocking the forgotten thing down.

It echoes, like an old bruise...