Dean's Diary (From Worcester News)

Dean's Diary

8:22am Wednesday 12th September 2007

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I have been at the hairdresser’s, waiting my turn for a trim with small boys who have come to be tidied up for the start of the school year. Deans also need tidying up after a couple of weeks’ holiday.
The young lady who cuts my hair tells me that there are 80 ladies’ hairdressers in Worcester.
I muse on such an astronomical number.
How can they possibly all stay in business?
How many men’s hairdressers does Worcester have?
How many times have I had my hair cut?
How much hair would there be if I had kept all the cuttings?
Idle questions float through my head as the locks of my hair float to the floor.
I once spoke at a sixth-form seminar on the ethics of the disposal of human remains.
The sixth-formers disagreed among themselves about the use of human organs for research.
Many thought that even very ancient skeletons should not be exhibited in museums.
I asked them what makes a human remain ‘human’?
A haircut, for instance: does that produce ‘human remains’ that ought to be treated with respect?
Some of the sixth-formers thought so, though I don’t think my hairdresser, sweeping my hair into her dustpan, would agree.
By and large, down the centuries, human beings have thought that the bodies of the dead should be treated with respect.
Different societies have different customs about the disposal of the dead, but they share a common respect for the body.
That is nowhere more evident than at the great war cemeteries in France, one of which I went see while I was on holiday.
Thousands of white crosses recede into the distance.
Each one marks a body, named or otherwise.
Each one is the reminder of one person’s bravery or fear or pain.
Each one is the reminder of one person’s lonely death and one family’s grief.
I muse on what strange creatures we are, wreaking death and destruction on each other with gusto, and then gathering up the bodies to bury them with reverence and attention.
In conventional wars, at any rate, respect is given to the enemy’s dead.
Illogical as that may be, it strikes me as a way of acknowledging our common humanity.
As I walked round the great cemetery on Omaha beach, I noticed people of all nationalities there, reading the inscriptions and musing on the stories that lay behind them.
In that place, at any rate, people were no longer taking sides.
It was a small sign of hope.