How do you build a chapel of bones?
It is the annual Town meeting. The mayor stands up and announces that the proposed plan to wall the small chapel at the back of the church with bones has been approved. The villagers applaud. The contractor smiles.
I suspect he’s not a specialist bone-walling contractor - not exactly that much business for such a niche even in the dark ages - but he now has something of a problem. B&Q do not stock pre-washed human remains, so where to start?
His research has indicated he will need the bones of approximately 1500 local people in order to complete the task. But the sleepy village of Alcantarilha is no big city.
He has three options:
1. Spend many months digging up every grave and opening every crypt in the surrounding area to fill his quota.
2. Sign an agreement with all the villagers that at their deaths they will not be buried, instead their bones will be de-fleshed and used to adorn the chapel. Clearly this project will progress like your average British building project with this method. Discounting a direct hit by meteor and the instantaneous death of all the villagers, this would take many years.
3. Begin a killing spree across the village and get the job done in a matter of months. that frees his time up to finish Mrs. Binkerton’s loft coversion. Perhaps a bonus will be in order if it’s sorted by Christmas… though there will be no-one left to write the cheque.
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I like the option number 3. Having people in your town is over rated anyway. They just get in the way.
I like having people in the surrounding town. Otherwise I’d not be able to watch them queue in endless streams of traffic past my window on their journeys to work each morning, while I casually make a bowl of bran, a pot of coffee and have a ponder on when I’ll bother wandering into the other room and start some work.
