Special Guest Blogger: Horseman Pestilence

Hi, I'm Pestilence. First Horseman of the Apocalypse. Destroyer of Empires, Harbinger of End Times and the winner of the Inaugural 1654 Leighton Buzzard Hide-and-Seek Championship.
While I am no longer splashed across the tabloids and hot on the lips of the masses so much, I was an indelible part of your history and was a household name for many centuries but it wasn’t all rainbows and pustules overnight.  
I cut my teeth in Asia in small mammals, rats mostly. Hardly glamorous, but it got me ready for my big break which was my move into humans, a move that would change the course of your lives forever and with my technique perfected, i made a direct line for the largest Empire of the time, that of the Romans.
At that time the mighty Roman Empire was being picked apart by invasions, corruption, debts and even Jesus finally said 'sod this' and packed it all in which plunged the entire continent into what’s commonly been known as the Dark Ages which was a bit of a rubbish time to be alive due to one of the worst pandemics the world has ever known, called the Black Death courtesy of the ultimate harbinger of misery, lil ol me.
Taking what i learnt, i knew i could take a disease from rats to humans with a bite but humans were wary of letting a rat bite them so i used fleas, practically undetectable until the sneaky little buggers had taken a big bite out of an old man’s butt and that was it. I was in.
As infected rats died, their hungry fleas made the switch to human blood and i was up and running and it wasn’t long before i was in the tavernas and the workshops, the brothels and the palaces and I worked my way around the whole continent bringing you fever, headaches, swollen lymph nodes, muscle pain, tissue necrosis and then when i was done playing, I  handed you over to the fourth horseman, Death.
I was flourishing and the Plague was a spectacular debut, but not my magnum opus which came nearly a thousand years later with the Black Death in an era before hand sanitizer and face masks, the preferred method of hygiene was to sniff vinegar and encourage children to smoke so unsurprisingly I saw off 50 million souls, almost two thirds of the population. A Golden Age indeed and possibly too successful because the lousy squashed and insanitary conditions in which i thrived got cleaned up.
You learnt about hygiene, about contamination and infection and inoculations and nowadays it isn't easy to start a global pandemic unless it is a completely new one, the golden oldies are being inoculated against now and it isn't easy to come up with new ones although i did have some success with Smallpox and more recently Covid but otherwise now is it a few isolated incidents, the odd mini flare-up in small communities, but with modern medicine, most are treatable although the rise of the anti-vaxxers in recent years does give some hope of an overdue return and that that my best may be yet to come.