Private Parties 'In Salon'

Right now, here where I am located, the national government has implemented a ban on private meetings inside people's residences, their homes, of ten people or greater.

Now that's a problem, since when you make the hour points on the clock, you know, for the naked women beneath their black capes, it's twelve... of them. The naked women.

I mean I could get probably get into some trouble with the women I know who may on the rare occasion, actually check what on earth I am telling the world here.

Twelve around the dial...

Meanwhile, however, since I'm pretty sure they are very busy elsewhere, running, um, 'transpersonal psychology' classes at retreats right next door to the dual-passport English people at their 'resort spas' in Costa Rica - you know, those people from MI6, some on the run, some in hiding and so on - so we can indulge in some fairly unrestrained gossip at least for the moment.

One of our friends has been stuck in Venice researching what the city-state there did during the plagues they experienced from between the 14th Century and the 17th Century. She probably should have perhaps gone to Florence first, because Florence was the one place where the plagues seemed to always have had the least fatalities recorded. It's genuinely quite possible in fact that they really did have the least fatalities, and one is not sure quite why, just now. 

Elixir of China, second from right

Yet nevertheless, it is indeed of great importance to see what the Venetians did to combat their problems - since Florence did not necessarily need to react in quite the same way since they had less of a problem in the first place; which is not to say they had no instances of what was then the Bubonic Plague, or the 'Black Death.'

The very word 'quarantine' derives from the Italian for 'forty' meaning forty days of isolation. Which is what the state of Venice required sufferers and others at risk to undergo to prevent further spreading of the disease.

Over the next few articles, we want to go into 'salon society' a little, with reference to its roots in the wealthy mansions and families of those empires of Europe which disappeared for the last time, effectively, with the final disasters caused by Napoleon.