Humpty-Dumpty

I was watching the news before going to sleep tonight and the Credit-Crunch Crisis was on. Some very personable but clearly a little stressed American Senator was being asked if the 'deal' was going to go through.

He said that "Humpty-Dumpty needed to be put back together again..." which made me laugh out loud and when I awoke in the middle of the night I lay awake thinking about it all.

I'm not awake because I am worried - my stock broker (haha, I have one - for now at least!!!), has had sleepless nights for the first time in 20 years, but not me. I just watch from the sidelines and wonder how 'they' (whoever 'they' are) ever managed to do the maths that enabled so many to borrow so much, without any means to pay it back.

I am totally innumerate - a legend of the arithmetic test (0% average)....but even I can see that the equation was never destined to work. My stock broker was right when he said that in his opinion "...there just isn't the intellect - at the top."

I have been in several Humpty-Dumpty situations myself.

As an embalmer, you get to appreciate the fragility of the human head when it comes into contact with a solid obstacle at speed. I know I have mentioned that several academics have criticised us as doing violence and invading the bodily space of the deceased as part of our work (Hallam et al, 1999, p.130), but frankly, if it was me and my child had been killed in an accident, I think I would be glad that someone just quietly set about spending hours putting Humpty-Dumpty back together, so that I could spend some last times with them before the oh so awful, premature, funeral.

Memory is a precious resource, I think of several of my accident restoration folk quite frequently. Them, and also those that I remember having visited them in chapel - the ones, who left behind in thier grief, never knew that I had been told that it would be an 'impossible job', when I collected thier precious dead from the hospital mortuary.

What's the world economy when it's weighed against the life of a teenager - or anyone for that matter?

Not a lot...

Hallam,E; Hockey,J; Howarth,G. (1999). Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. London and New York. Routledge.