Monday, April 20, 2020

Huelgazo Mortal

It is being reported that some members of Britain's wealthy elite are doing their own household chores, many for the first time. 

From what I can tell, this sort of self-sacrifice for the common good is yet to take hold in our own neighbourhood, here in Guatemala.  

Back in seventeenth century London there were servants a-plenty, and in A Journal Of The Plague Year Daniel Defoe was quick to pinpoint their role in the spreading of the 'fatal breath'...
"The infection generally came into the houses of the citizens by the means of their servants, whom they were obliged to send up and down the streets for necessaries; that is to say, for food or physic, to bakehouses, brew-houses, shops, &c.; and who going necessarily through the streets into shops, markets, and the like, it was impossible but that they should, one way or other, meet with distempered people, who conveyed the fatal breath into them, and they brought it home to the families to which they belonged."

They were perhaps fortunate that there was no such thing as pizza delivery back then, and the servants tended to live-in. 

One of the issues around here is that the domestic helpers many seem unable to cope without, generally commute into the centre using non-personal means of transportation. 






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