Gnome-Trek: Episode 7. Into the Plague: Chapter 5

Europe, the Schengen Frontier. 

These are the continuing voyages of the Flying-Brick ‘Gnome’. It's a van with a coffee machine...

Chapter 5: Lacave Part 2.

My mission: More Espresso...

A thousand years ago, someone obviously thought that building this monument to their narcissism would be a good idea. "Look at me, I've got lots of money and you haven't". However, to control the peasants (who were, after all, the poor bastards who built the bloody thing) they needed more than huge impenetrable stone walls, they also needed to control their souls. To this end, a church was built even higher than the castle itself, thus proving its worth to the subjugated masses below.

It was later rebuilt in the fourteenth century to prove, yet again, that it was much better having money than just living off the soil. 

They had a point...

All this effort was expended to control the masses, and yet, if they had waited for only about four hundred years, for the Knights of St John, then the coffee that they brought with them from the Great Siege of Malta (another little known fact) would have worked just as well.

Coffee. Better than building churches. A catchy slogan I think.

___

Back in the Gnome, my morning coffee was beginning to have its profound effect, slowing my spouting of philosophy...

This stop-over was but a quick break.  To get to our next stop involved a long drive and we needed to set off early. We were to head for the Loire Valley, to see how castles really should be built, to see how the masses really should be repressed. (Aarghhh! Give him another coffee!)

Meanwhile, back in abnormal land, the Elf had been tested for the dreaded plague on mankind. And Elfkind. We awaited the result. If negative then our cunning plan could continue. If positive our cunning plan was wrecked. If no result came, then our plan was but a dog's breakfast. 

If this was not enough to knock us off course, news then arrived of another nail in the coffin of our not-so cunning plan. Wales was to lockdown completely in three days time. The very day that we were due to arrive in the UK. Failing a direct asteroid hit, what else could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot actually...