Journal of the Plague Years

Three decades, of war, plague and the greatest accidental fire to have devoured a European city, ought to have broken London...

Part of the horror of living through the year of plague in 1665, for Londoners, must have been the knowing and the not knowing at the same time.

Recurrent epidemics of the plague had been a part of life for 300 years, so they knew only too well what was happening - the horror of the disease and the mortality, of course, but also the way it started in a single street, or even a single house, the way it spread over days, first to half a dozen homes, then twenty; the hope that it wouldn't spread further, the sickening fear as it did, the first acquaintance, then friend, then family to be infected, then the first house in their own street...

They knew what was happening, but they didn't know why it was happening, the mechanism, nor how to stop it nor what was to be done. The religious may have thought that it was the wrath of God (as had all the world believed, 300 years earlier). I don't know whether that would have been a consolation or an even greater horror; but the evidence seems to be that rational people, while they prayed for the plague to end, suspected that the causes were natural - without knowing, of course, of what nature.

Fast forward 340 years, to the present: What I know, or think I know, and what I don't know, aren't the same now as they would have been then; but sense of knowing and not knowing may not be so different. And since the picture isn't much more clear now than then, either, we still aren't all agreed what actually is happening.

But this is my website: I believe that there are things happening which are potentially as fatal to me and mine as the plague - primarily, of course, pollution, climate change, resource exhaustion and overpopulation. I believe that I understand what is happening, and even some of the why. I believe that these are the modern plague, and that the plague has already reached the next borough and will soon be encroaching on mine.

Unfortunately, I believe we still have a poor understanding of the mechanisms of the plague, and of what is to be done. I also believe that we're not really preparing for what's happening, even within our understanding; that the (sometimes?) (too often?) inept, greedy, lazy and blind government and bureaucracy we see are symptomatic of our unreadiness; and that the plague is will hit harder because of it.

So, because it is my website, I choose to identify it with 'The Plague'.

There. After three months, I've finally got around to explaining myself.

25 January 2008 .

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The General (Annual) Bill for 1665: the Bills of Mortality are testimony to an extraordinary sense of Duty.