In Shakespeare's Henry V, our hero-king rouses his troops with a terrific speech before the decisive battle of Agincourt.
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He explains that even if they lose, they will still win... because the stench of their rotting, putrid corpses, piled up on the battlefield, will be picked up by a summer breeze and: "The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France".
It's a clever idea isn't it? Shakespeare thinks of everything. A forerunner of chemical warfare.
It's also a sort of a precursor of the zombie epic, so popular in our own times, where the pathogen-carrying walking dead rise like spirits to wreak havoc on innocents like you and me hiding behind the castle wall.
Yes, this is a revenge tragedy on the grandest scale.
But because 2020 was a time when the facts were so much stranger than fiction (or were easily confused with each other), it is only fitting that a story emerges whereby 17 million mink seek revenge for being made into coats and shawls for the fabulously wealthy and extremely tasteless.
Yes, this is a revenge tragedy on the grandest scale. This is truly a lesson for our times.
What goes around, comes around.
The story begins quietly in Denmark with the realisation that several hundred people had become infected with a potentially mutant strain of Covid-19 that had somehow infected the mink, who, as it happens, are farmed in Denmark on an industrial scale.
To halt the spread of the virus, the Danes decided to gas and then burn 17 million of them.
You think I'm making this up don't you?
Believe me, this gets so much weirder.
Well, it turns out the mink cull was a bit rushed. They didn't quite bury the mink deep enough, and through the decaying process gases began to form, and in a truly macabre twist, the whole burial ground started to expand and, yes, you guessed it, the long-dead bodies of the mink began to rise to the surface and in fact push out of the ground... yes, out of the ground.
The police described it as "a natural process".
Oh yes, that's as natural as 17 million mink rising from the underworld and marching through the night to Monte Carlo searching for their parents, brothers and sisters who are draped around the white porcelain shoulders of aristocrats, gamblers and grifters while they roll the dice, unaware that their day of reckoning is now upon them.
Svetlana run for the yacht... the mink are on the move.
