Torn between the love and the abuse

“THEY were on honeymoon the first time he hit her.
“It went on for years after that. In the end, he broke three of her ribs – not in one attack, but three separate occasions.
“You know the old cliché, ‘I walked into a door, mum’ – or, ‘I fell down stairs, mum’.
“It wasn’t until he started turning on the kids that she left. Even then the courts awarded him access and told him where she was living.
“So don’t say it’s easy for a woman to leave, or to speak up, or to get the help she needs. Just ask my Julia.”
Her name’s not Julia, of course. And her mum stays anonymous too after contacting me about my Evening Star column two weeks ago.
But to set the record straight, I didn’t say there was anything easy about domestic violence for a woman victim. I would never say, or mean to suggest, any such thing.
What I did mean was to point out that men can be victims too.
In trying to open up a murky subject, I seem to have touched a few raw nerves.
One male reader commented: “Back in the 90s, when I was on the receiving end of an abusive relationship, I felt like I was the only one. That this didn’t happen to men.
“I was isolated and felt no one would have believed me – to the extent I couldn’t even bring it up in a Relate session. Mind you, having her in the room at the time didn’t help.”
Another reader sees the matter from another angle.
He said: “In 14 years with the Alcohol Advisory Service and then the Samaritans I listened to many, many abused women but only about two abused men.
“My estimate is that abused women outnumber abused men by about four to one, that abused women who suffer in silence outnumber the ones who get listened to, but abused women who get listened to outnumber abused men who get listened to by about 40 to one.
“Every one of them is a real person in real distress.”
That informed view underlines the reason I wrote my original article.
The good Samaritan also adds a chilling note: “Children, of course, are often hostages.”
One of my oldest friends, Carolyn, lives now in Australia, where she has worked for several years as a counsellor in a women’s refuge.
She said: “I think domestic violence is under-reported in both males and females.
“In my experience working with women, many don’t even recognise that they are in an abusive relationship. They minimise what they are experiencing because we only tend to hear about high-end abuse in the media.
“Sometimes they are reluctant to involve the police for the same reasons mentioned in the article, sometimes because they are too afraid.
“As to women being prosecuted, this will be appropriate in some cases, but I have talked to many who are goaded into physical violence so that the man can appear to be the victim and use the legal system as yet another instrument of abuse.
“Many women retaliate after years of abuse, or are acting in self-defence.”
I don’t doubt the truth of that. But that very fact can work against men too.
Such as Dan, whose story I told, who left a long-term abusive relationship after retaliating for the first and only time.
If Irene had accused him then, who would have believed that for years it was she who had been assaulting him?
Carolyn, understandably, is most enraged by male violence. But she concludes: “Abuse is never OK, no matter who perpetrates it.
“I’ve heard one or two horror stories about men walking into a police station and being treated with contempt.
“People are rarely prosecuted unless physical violence is involved, but emotional and psychological abuse is highly damaging, and the effects can last years, if not a lifetime.
“Bruises, cuts, burns, broken limbs etc can be seen whereas emotional abuse is invisible and often not believed because the abuser is typically so charming to everyone else.
“It crushes who you are as a person and makes it very difficult to be a functioning human being.”
A disturbing conclusion with which I know Dan and Steve, my original interviewees, would wholeheartedly agree.
Cheryl, another friend from my school days, replied to my article with a tragedy.
She said: “ I lost a friend in Paris who was regularly beaten up by her partner.
“She refused to give evidence to the police while she was in hospital, where she died of her injuries.
“I also have a close family member who was abused by his wife and has now left her because the level of violence from her reached a point of no return.
“The stats mean nothing if we are unable to discuss the problem clearly and offer support to all those who find themselves in such a terrible situation, torn between the love and the abuse.”

Do you buy it? Drugs on sale at the politics show

IS Andrew Lansley a dead politician walking? Or has the health secretary managed to wriggle out of a humiliation with face somehow intact?
Or, as his boss David Cameron cunningly spun it, is a series of apparent climbdowns a sign not of weakness but of strength?
I say “apparent” climbdowns because we haven’t actually seen the detail yet. All we’ve had so far is speeches – from Cameron, from his sidekick Nick Clegg, and from Lansley.
They want us to think things have changed for the better. That they’ve been listening to all our concerns.
That we can trust them with our lives. Maybe literally.
And you know what? All I’ve named so far is people. Three blokes in suits and ties.
Two or three inches in and I still haven’t identified my subject as the butchery – sorry, “reform” – of our National Health Service.
And isn’t that the root trouble with politics?
In a democracy, it’s supposed to be “the people” who decide what happens about crucially important things such as the NHS.
But there a couple of problems with this. Well, quite a lot of problems actually, but just a couple I want to mention now.
One is that there isn’t really any such thing as “the people”.
I’m one person with one set of thoughts and opinions. You’re another person with another set.
Are we likely to agree?
On some things, maybe. On everything… not a chance.
And that’s just two of us among millions.
Anyone who tries to tell you what “the people” thinks is trying to put over a particular view – probably their own.
The other big problem is information, or the lack of it.
For democracy to have a chance of working well, even in a perfect world (which this is far from being), “the people” needs to be well informed.
That, in theory, is what the press – papers, magazines, TV, radio, and now the internet – is supposed to provide.
And do we? Er, no, not very well.
After all, you don’t really know how the NHS (for example) works in all its detail, do you? Or the banking system. Or education. Or all the things the government is supposed to be in charge of on our behalf.
There’s more there than you or I could keep tabs on even if it was all we did.
And I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have difficulty deciding whether I fancy Marmite or marmalade on my toast in the morning.
In fact, when you stop to consider all the reasons why “the press” fails to keep “the people” fully informed on important matters all the time, the real surprise is that we do it as well as we do.
After all, there’s Ryan Giggs’s sex life, Wayne Rooney’s hair and the off-screen lives of every soap star or talent-show wannabe to keep on top of too.
After which politics can look a bit dry to many people. And difficult – not just for “the people” but for journalists too.
Which is why we usually end up treating it like another soap.
As if it was the cast – Lansley, Cameron and Clegg this week, with walk-on parts for the brothers Miliband – that mattered.
Rather than the really important stuff of policy.
Does the question of Andrew Lansley’s political future, with which I began this column, actually matter?
Not a jot, except to the Lansley family. And probably not a great deal to them either – I’m sure he’ll never go short of wonga.
Does the future of the NHS matter? Very much indeed.
Which is why the most interesting thing about Lansley’s big speech on Wednesday wasn’t anything he said. That was just another speech, another political platform.
It wasn’t even the reaction of his audience, made up of hundreds of GPs.
No, the interesting thing was where it took place – the 2011 Commissioning Show at the Kensington Olympia conference centre in West London.
And that right outside the main hall was a sea of stalls with all the big names represented – AstraZeneca, Bayer, Boots, Bosch, Capita, GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Specsavers, UnitedHealth and dozens of others you might or might not have heard of. Banks and lawyers as well as drug companies.
Proof, if any more were needed, that our national health is already about business as much as service.
It would take a far bigger politician than Lansley to put that genie back in the bottle.
Even if he wanted to. Which of course he doesn’t, being just another snake-oil medicine-seller himself.


****


OH the joy of getting a bit of real rain on the garden at last.
It’ll take a lot more before we shrug off all talk of drought, of course. Everywhere is still looking pretty parched.
But there are surprises and delights out there too.
Right now in Fen Meadow in Woodbridge, in a patch the council has deliberately and properly left unmown, is the finest crop of wild marsh orchids I’ve ever seen in Britain.

I knew the end had come the day I hit her back

The number of women convicted of domestic violence in England and Wales has more than doubled in the past five years. Figures obtained from the Crown Prosecution Service by the BBC this week showed that almost 4,000 women were successfully prosecuted in the past year, compared with 1,500 in 2005. Here I speak to two male victims of domestic violence about their experiences, and the difficulty of coming forward. Names have been changed.

--

DAN, a professional man, lived with Irene for 16 years. She began drinking heavily before they were married but it was some years before her often erratic behaviour turned violent.
After that there were a few more bad years before he finally left, moving on his own to a job in Suffolk.
“The drink was always the problem,” he said.
“It started as a social thing, a way of getting out and meeting people while I was out at work. I’d come home and find her passed out on the sofa or the floor.
“She did get a couple of jobs over the years, but she never managed to keep them for long.
“I’d join her in the pub most evenings for a pint or two, but she took to staying when I went home.
“She got in a few fights, and got barred from a few pubs, before she ever got violent with me. But once she did, it became a sort of habit.
“I knew the end had come when I hit her back.
“Actually she was coming for me with a bottle and I just pushed her away. But she fell against the wall and hit her head, and I realised with a shock that people might think it was me who was the violent one.
“That was the only time I tried to defend myself in years of being regularly hit, scratched, kicked or having things thrown at me – mostly glasses.
“The funniest time was when she tipped a plate of spaghetti bolognaise over me in the bath.
“After that there was a period when she regularly used to throw food at me, or tip it on the floor, after I’d cooked it for her. It was always me who did the cooking.
“She’d stay in the pub until well after closing-time. When she got home she’d often wake me up, sometimes by pulling the bedclothes off and hitting me with a hairbrush.
“Once on holiday in Greece she woke me up by pushing an electric fan in my face. When I tipped away the last of the whisky she was drinking she went mad.
“She broke the bottle against the wall and filled my bed with the bits of broken glass.
“Even though it was the middle of the night I got out and went to find another hotel to sleep in.”
At one point Dan started going to meetings of Al-Anon, a group which provides support to anyone whose life is affected by someone else’s drinking.
“In lots of ways Al-Anon was great,” he said. “It’s such a relief to be able to talk to people who understand what you’re going through.
“On the other hand, all the others there were women, which made me feel a bit of a freak.
“You start wondering whether you’re the only man in the world who regularly gets assaulted by a drunken woman. Or whether you’re just the only one prepared to admit it.”

--


STEVE, now happily married, lived for several years with an abusive partner.
He suspects the rise in prosecutions for female domestic violence is mostly to do with an increase in reporting. But he thinks the official figures still show only the tip of the iceberg.
He said: “When you love someone, you don’t want to think badly of them.
“If their behaviour’s bad, you go on thinking they’ll get better and that you can help them to change.
“In the end it’s you that changes. You start seeing yourself as one of life’s victims. And it affects everything – friends, social life, work.
“You develop a habit of secrecy, of pretending everything’s OK. And that doesn’t just make it harder to seek help – you don’t see ‘help’ as something you can possibly ask for.
“I know it’s bad for a lot of women. But there’s a culture that allows women to admit there’s a problem and to seek help – maybe from the police, or Women’s Aid, or just friends.
“For men it’s a lot harder. That culture of help isn’t there.
“You might see it as weak to admit there’s a problem – even to yourself. You certainly don’t expect understanding or sympathy from colleagues or the police.
“Not that you’d necessarily even think of going to the police. Because apart from anything else, that would mean you were branding your wife or girlfriend as a criminal.
“And if there’s any love still there, that’s something you can’t do – any more than you can brand yourself openly as a victim.”

Nuked by the free market

MARKETS are supposed to be good for us.
In fact, in the world we’ve lived in since the 1980s, markets seem to have taken the place once assigned to God – that of the only arbiter of goodness.
“The markets” decide what’s right, what’s good, what’s going to happen.
Which is pinning an awful lot on a vague concept. A concept which, which when it comes down to it, just means a lot of people (mostly men) trying to sell each other stuff.
Each one of those mostly men is acting more or less out of self-interest.
According to the fundamental believers, that’s how they are supposed to act. Not in some “woolly liberal” spirit of the public interest, but purely for personal gain.
The theory seems to be that if enough mostly men compete, bully, jostle and lie to each other hard enough their greed-based actions will somehow combine to produce the best possible outcome for the greatest number of people.
The fuel, and the rather blunt measuring tool, for all of this is money.
And the oil that keeps the machine turning is advertising – by another name, propaganda. Or, to use its now more acceptable, market-led title, marketing.
In the “free world” (that is, the capitalist world, or at least the wealthier parts of it), buying and selling doesn’t just rule the market. The market rules the world, from its most trivial detail to its biggest policy decisions.
Markets decide which brand of sweets is in favour in the playground this year. And whether the world cares enough about climate change to do something about it.
They determine policy – at best by negotiation with politicians, more commonly by having the politicians in their pockets.
In the end, it will be markets – mostly men trying to sell each other stuff – who decide what power sources we will rely on in the homes and factories of the future.
Those few impassioned people who truly want the best for all know that means putting all our efforts into renewable energy – wind, sun, tide. Which, if you think about it, are not just renewable but free. Use them and they’re still there.
It should be a simple choice. But that’s before you bring in the markets.
And anything that’s ultimately free doesn’t sound like a thing you can keep on selling.
Here’s a version of an eye-catching graphic that’s been doing the rounds on the internet lately that compares the safety records of three major sources of power:


It’s based on statistics that say that for every person killed by nuclear power, 4,000 die from coal-related causes.
So what does this show you?
That nuclear is the safest power source we have?
Or, perhaps, that following the disaster at Fukushima the pro-nuclear lobby has got worried and started bombarding us with fresh propaganda?
One of the places the graphic has popped up is on the blog of Seth Godin, an American author described as a “marketing guru”. A title which, when you think about, reveals the way the markets have taken on pseudo-religious status.
Being a guru, however, he is at least wise enough not to take the chart entirely at face value.
He says: “Vivid is not the same as true.
“It’s far easier to amplify sudden and horrible outcomes than it is to talk about the slow, grinding reality of day-to-day strife. That’s just human nature.
“Not included in this chart are deaths due to global political instability involving oil fields, deaths from coastal flooding and deaths due to environmental impacts yet unmeasured, all of which skew it even more if you think about it.”
Well yes, Seth – but maybe they don’t skew it in the way you seem to think.
The environmental impacts of coal are known unknowns. Whereas those of nuclear power?
The chart is based on statistics – at best a clumsy tool, more commonly a sophisticated method of lying.
So where is the lie here?
Firstly, the nuclear figure is the industry’s claim, not the truth, which is probably impossible to discover.
Stats on deaths due to nuclear power can only regarded as largely fictional – beyond those immediately killed by high doses of radiation at source.
Then, the figures include only those known to have died so far. No account is taken of the millions whose deaths could be caused in future.
And it is, surely, the future we are trying to decide here.
In any case “safer than the coal or oil industries” isn’t much recommendation of anything. They’re both disgracefully dangerous.
They could both be made much safer relatively easily. And in fact the figures are based on world averages, which include China, where the death-rate in the coal industry is 18 times higher than here or in America.
It’s interesting that the chart doesn’t show the gas industry, which produces more electricity in the UK than coal, oil, or nuclear.
According to the figures, the blob for natural gas should be one ninth the size of that for oil.
Those for solar, wind and hydro generation should be a little larger than the nuclear dot.
A little larger for now – but without the potential to grow suddenly, in one big bang, from a dot to a page-obliterating black splodge.
The fissile plutonium produced in nuclear reactors will go on being radioactive for thousands of human generations.
Can we build nuclear power-stations, and waste-dumps, to be safe that long?
Or are today’s politicians – and today’s markets – in danger of taking decisions that will be a crime against humanity to come?

Roy of the Rovers' legal own-goal

I HAVE always had the highest regard for Mr X as a footballer.
His only serious failing in that regard is his lamentable decision to play all his career for Melchester Rovers instead of for my team. And indeed, similarly, to represent another nation rather than England.
On the rare occasions when he speaks in public at all, he tends to speak reasonably well about football. Not about much else, but then why should he? He is, after all, a footballer.
Frankly, I don’t know much else about him. And indeed, why should we? What business, or interest, is it of ours?
It seems now, however, that as a human being he is… well… human.
He has, unremarkably enough, a sex life. One which now turns out to be a little less than straightforward. Which is also normal enough – and not just for footballers.
Few of us, I suspect, would want the details of our romantic activities to be widely known. I can sympathise with Mr X there.
On the other hand, being rich and famous has brought him huge privileges. The almost inevitable down side of which is a certain loss of privacy.
Had he been prepared to take the rough with the smooth, Mr X would have found his sex life made public months ago.
It would undoubtedly have been embarrassing. For a little while.
By now, his bedroom games would be long-discarded chip-wrapping. While his football game would continue to delight.
Mr X, however, has been badly advised. Perhaps by fellow footballers, perhaps by an agent or other interested party, maybe even by his wronged wife.
Possibly by m’learned friend, who is clearly the chief beneficiary.
Because Mr X was encouraged to use some of his great wealth to prevent disclosure of his private life to the public. And so he took out what has come to be known as a super-injunction.
Also known, more graphically, as a gagging order.
One of the curious effects of which has been that while I have known of the case for weeks, as a journalist I have not been allowed to mention it.
Frankly, if it were only Mr X’s love-life at issue I wouldn’t be interested anyway.
But his recourse to law, his attempt to use money to hush things up, is of much more vital concern.
His love-life is perhaps of passing interest to the public.
His privileged use of a bad piece of legislation should be more so. Indeed, breaking that law – not just transgressing it, but getting rid of it entirely – is most definitely in the public interest.
Which is why Mr X may ultimately, inadvertently, have done us all a favour.
After being exposed by thousands of Twitter users, and then more crucially in the House of Commons by MP John Hemming, Roy Race – yes, I can now name him! – has been the implement by which a coach and horses has been driven through that lousy law.
And why is it a lousy law?
Not because a number of overpaid sporting stars – yes, there are others! – have used it to try to conceal their away games.
Not merely because, like so much of the law, it serves only the interests of the rich.
But because among the 80-odd such injunctions still functioning there could be some that are more serious.
Take Sir Fred Goodwin. From 2001 to 2009 he was chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. He presided over the bank’s rapid rise, and then its even more rapid fall.
In 2008 the bank lost a British record £24.1billion. While the British taxpayer picked up the tab – a substantial factor in the nation’s economic woes – Goodwin, then 50, rode off into the sunset with a pension of about £700,000 a year.
Meanwhile, he was allegedly having an affair with another of the bank’s senior staff. Something which may or may not have involved “a serious breach of corporate governance” at the now-nationalised bank.
He didn’t want us to know that. We only do because Lord Stoneham revealed it in the House of Lords, leading to the lifting of an injunction.
A bank source now says it is “slightly ludicrous” to suggest Sir Fred’s decision-making was impaired by any affair. Equally ludicrously, the same source likens the alleged dalliance to “holidays and hobbies”.
Following an investigation, the bank says: “We are satisfied the employee in question did not compromise the bank in any way.”
Maybe. But is the whole matter of interest?
More to the point, is it in the public interest to know about it?
You bet it is.
If not a multi-billion-pound bet, then at least a £700,000 one.
Meanwhile, how come we all now know about Roy Race but still can’t even name the other footballers, the manager, the TV star, the actor, the comedian, the world-famous athlete and the “rich public figure” who still have super-injunctions in force?
Maybe it’s time for Mr Hemmings or Lord Stoneham to get to their feet again. Or for Twitter to get busy once more.

Once upon a time there was a famous physicist called Stephen...

SHOCK story of the week: “Stephen Hawking says heaven’s just a fairy story for those who are afraid of the dark.”
Or, to put it another way: “Famous scientist states the bloomin’ obvious.”
Now, if the Pope, say, had made that statement it might have been news. Or if Hawking had claimed his debilitating motor neurone disease was a curse from the Devil.
Hawking has spent most of a brilliant life trying to discover the way things actually are, how we got here, the way things work.
The answers he and his fellow leading physicists have come up with so far may or may not be the right ones. The best anyone can say is that they’re the best answers we’ve got so far.
They have at least been arrived at by intelligent inquiry, scepticism and careful, repeated experiment. Not by either wishful thinking or taking old stories as gospel.
To Hawking, the question of whether there’s really a heaven, in the common religious sense, is surely an old chestnut long ago cracked and discarded.
I’d like to think that if I’d been interviewing him I’d have had more interesting questions to ask. If only I’d have had a chance of understanding – properly understanding – the answers.
And there, of course, lies at least part of the problem.
I know just about enough of both astral and quantum physics – the big picture and the little picture – to find them fascinating, compelling and a bit weird. But nowhere near enough to claim I really understand them.
I know that without some of the weirdness your telly, your computer, your mobile phone wouldn’t work. But if it comes to explaining HOW they work… Well, could you?
So much easier just to listen to the fairy stories. Especially if you’ve got that night-phobia thing.
But hang on. Whoever said it’s going to be dark when you die? You can’t experience darkness if you have no senses to perceive light.
The idea of eternal darkness is just as much a fairytale as winged harpists sitting on clouds, luscious damsels plying martyrs with intoxicating drinks – or evil-smelling demons torturing sinners forever with red-hot tongs.
They all assume, contrary to all verifiable evidence, that consciousness will somehow continue after your body is no more.
If you really want to know about the after-life, the person to ask isn’t Stephen Hawking. Unless by “after-life” you mean the projected future of the planets, stars and galaxies long after our species – all species – have ceased to exist.
If it’s visions of Paradise (or everlasting darkness) you’re after, the chap to consult is John Casey, author of the book After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.
In which you will find, among other delightful titbits, that the ancient Egyptians’ idea of heaven was just like a better Egypt, with plenty of bread, pastry, beer and wine.
Unfortunately, at least in the early days, only the pharaoh and his family had any hope of getting there. The idea of an afterlife for all came later.
As for hell, with fire, brimstone and torments eternal, that came later still.
It was, in fact, essentially a medieval invention, contrived to frighten the populace into obedience.
Like so much of Christian tradition it owed little to Christ, or to the book upon which all was supposed to depend.
The Bible has 622 instances of the word “heaven” but only 13 of “hell” – all from the New Testament, all but two of them from the gospels, and more than half of them from the Book of Matthew.
But if there is a heaven, or a hell, where are they?
Attempting, in 1727, to reconcile old religious notions with new scientific ones, Tobias Swinden published An Enquiry Into the Nature and Place of Hell.
In which he took around 500 pages to conclude that hell must be in the sun – the only place with enough fire to last forever.
It would seem the idea of space travel, which Hawking is broadly in favour of, is not so new. Travelling to the sun, though? That would be hell.


****


NICK CLEGG was momentarily taken aback. The petition he’d just been handed came in a heavy box containing 385,747 names (including mine).
Addressed to the government, it said: “Our NHS is precious. We won’t forgive you if you ruin it.
“Don’t break up our health service and hand it to private healthcare companies.
“Listen to the real experts – doctors, nurses and patients – when they give warnings about these plans.”
Maybe the LibDem leader was in the mood to start distancing himself from the Tories anyway. Maybe he already had it in mind to stand up for the NHS against the grubby hands of free enterprise.
Or just maybe he was swayed by the clarity and strength of feeling shown in the petition and its presenters. In which case, perhaps there is hope for democracy.
And, if Clegg’s party is at last prepared to show some spine, hope for the survival of the NHS.

Dead reckoning that puts a cash price on your body

THERE are lots of reasons to be queasy about the death of Osama Bin Laden. The no-doubt grisly photos are not, as it happens, among them.
The apparent fact that they were taken is one thing. (I say “apparent”, because what of this whole grimy business can we really take as fact?) That no photos have been released to public view is another.
Not to be used as propaganda? What else was the whole mission if not a gigantic exercise in US propaganda?
Too unpleasant to be seen (even if a child was there to witness the event itself)?
And then there is the haste with which Bin Laden’s body was (apparently) disposed of.
If Muslim sensibilities were really the reason, then why at sea?
Is it entirely irrelevant that that makes any post-mortem impossible – or even an indisputable identification?
If the Americans wanted to provide material for another batch of conspiracy theories to match those spawned by 9/11 they could hardly have gone about it better.
I made it clear last week why I thought the killing was wrong. I don’t want to add now to the welter of theories, or even ethical concerns.
But rather like another historically ambiguous episode, this whole story has put an extraordinary focus on a corpse. More specifically, a missing corpse.
What is it about dead bodies that we find so revolting – and at the same time so fascinating?
In our society there is nothing we like to look at more than human bodies. It’s only when the life goes from them that we whisk them out of sight.
The idea of killing is constantly in the news, constantly part of our entertainment.
Shoot-em-up games have moved on from the cowboys-n-injuns of my primary school playground to the slick graphics of the latest computer simulations.
But real bodies, real human meat, remain as absent from our everyday lives as they were from The Lone Ranger or Space Invaders.
Not just since medieval or Tudor times, when the physicality of death was a known reality to all, but since the Second World War, death has been sanitised. Swept up. Cleaned away.
Like those photos of Bin Laden’s remains, dead flesh has become something we’re not supposed to see.
Which perhaps goes some way to accounting for the inflation of graphic nastiness in horror movies. And the increasing obsession in detective fiction, on the page and on screen, with forensics and pathology.
Maybe it’s time we treated the shivery obsession with a healthy dose of realism.
After all, there’s nothing so certain as death and taxes. And taxes haven’t always been around.
So let’s consider the reality of dead bodies. Not shot-up celebrity corpses like Bin Laden’s, just ordinary everyday cadavers such as yours and mine will be one day.
Reality, in this cash-conscious capitalist world, is most commonly measured in monetary units.
For some reason, we usually make an exception to this when it comes to dying. Unless you’re talking about the will of someone wealthy. And even then the deceased’s physical remains are seldom considered.
Yet looked at as a collection of reusable scrap parts, a human body can be worth a good deal of money. Which almost makes it perverse that most of us pay simply to have the thing disposed of.
A full set of heart valves in good nick is supposed to be worth about £16,000. The corneas in your eyes, undamaged and with proper legal provenance, could fetch £3,600. Your brain only has a market value of about £350 – but a whole head can be worth ten times that to the right buyer and with all the paperwork in order.
Then there’s the skin, the hair, the other organs. All with potentially good trade-in value. Unlike your cremated ashes, which are worth less than the battery from your old mobile phone.
It’s just as well, I suppose, that law and taboo should restrict trade in human parts. And of course there’s always the question of ownership.
But there are plenty of valid reasons – medical, educational and experimental – why those parts might be better used than as food for worms or fishes.
And if you baulk at the idea of someone selling your bits after your demise, bequeathing them to medical science is an excellent option.
This is all assuming, of course – as I do – that once deceased your body stops caring what happens to it. Or, indeed, about anything else.
That should apply even if you ascribe to a belief in an after-life. Which seems to me to be wishful thinking of the oddest kind. Odd and misplaced.
The time before our birth does not scare, or even mystify, us much – so why should the time after our death? In both we are equally non-conscious, non-existent.
I find this not only more plausible, but also a more comforting idea than any imagined afterlife.
As Woody Allen put it: “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”