Hair Today Gone Tomorrow
Ministerial Meandering
Hair today…gone tomorrow
At boarding school in the 60’s, for some bizarre reason I got the nickname of ‘Boris.’ I had no idea why for quite some time until I manage to persuade a friend of mine to spill the beans.
The pop group, ‘The Who’, had produced a track on one of their albums (A Quick One) in 1966 for Halloween, which included a track called ‘Boris the Spider’. I was no wiser; then I found the lyrics in which said spider is described as ‘black and hairy, very small.’
As I was late in my adolescent growth spurt, I was still only around 5’2” at the age of 16. But I did have a lot of dark, black hair - certainly over my collar. I know - it may be hard to envisage that now but I did once- hence the title to this MM.
I am also using this title in a wistful sort of way, as I have just given Sheila a second full bag of Gracie’s hair, which I have collected over the years of grooming her, and asked Sheila to make me a cushion or pillow out of it. That way, when Gracie’s time comes to go over Rainbow Bridge, I will always something of her to remind me. Sheila opened one of the bags, sniffed, made a face, and said, “Phew - I need to wash this!” I said, “Absolutely not!” It has to smell of Gracie - that’s part of the exercise. ‘Gross’, you may say - to which I would retort, “It’s not your pillow.”
But it’s not just hair that leaves us as we go through life. Other things that we are attached to also leave us, and we have sometimes as little control over them as we do over impending baldness.
I think here of friendships that I was certain would last a lifetime and which, for reasons I cannot explain, have somehow gradually vanished. There are some, of course, though estranged for many years, are easy to pick up again, as though no time had passed at all. Others seem to have got stuck in a time warp, and seem impossible to access, like frozen mammoths in permafrost. One of the problems we have of losing relationships is that we cannot do without friends.
A recent article in the Economist discusses this in a leader entitled ‘The Great Relationship Recession’. Perhaps it is not so much about losing relationship, as about choosing not to have them in the first place. It talks about the increasing number of (especially young) people who are now choosing to live alone, and the concurrent drop in birthrates globally. This has not been good for society - and naturally increases the need for housing.
In addition to this, women are outperforming men in the workplace - probably because they were better students at school - and increasing numbers of disappointed young men are turning to violent crime. I suspect this is in part to vent their rage at their academic and intellectual impotence. Such male prospects are not attractive to their female peers (mostly), and will also likely face rejection on the partner front, only increasing their frustration - and possibly rape crime.
I still believe that bringing back National Service, for an obligatory 2 years after school leaving, would kick some sense of discipline and responsibility into them, along with a concept of teamwork. I suggest it would keep them off the streets, reduce gang-violence and drug use, and give many of them a final chance to get the education they spurned at school. It would also make many more of these otherwise ignorant and aggressive young men considerably more attractive to young women who are seeking a more mature partner, and not an overgrown adolescent yobbo.
Some of the ‘hair’ that we need to re-grow or restore, therefore, is that of better education and discipline. Pandering to increasingly outrageous PC demands, that purport to teach ‘Sex Education’ in schools - with no qualifications - and remove any moral or ethical instruction - be-it philosophy or religious studies - is not the way forward. If we go on down that path, not only will we all be hairless, but the next leader in the Economist will be, ‘Anarchy has arrived - how did this happen?’
Philip+