Until further notice, this blog will be called “The View from the Knacker’s Yard”. For the uninitiated, a knacker’s yard is a place, a field or a compound where horses that are no longer capable of working are taken to await the attention of the slaughterer, soon to be followed by the tanner and the glue factor. In metaphorical terms, the knacker’s yard can be thought of as the vestibule in the house of the Grim Reaper and in a down-to-earth sense it can be identified with Retirement, a state of being that has proven to be quite pleasurable for me-so far.

Cattle, pigs and sheep, and even goats, I suppose, have their end of life experience at a different slaughterhouse from that of the horses, since their corpses are processed for human consumption and certain standards of hygiene need to be applied. But whether you are a horse, a pig, or any other of our four-legged friends (and the two-legged ones, with wings), you have an after-life. Your death represents an opportunity for you to be transmuted into victuals in the form of a steak, a sausage, a lamb shank, a sweetbread, or a chicken breast, among many other goodies. Not only that, but the non-edible parts of you might become leather, soap, candles (tallow), and adhesives (glue).You will recognize that my tongue is somewhat in my cheek here, since we all know that it is the need of humans for sustenance that brings the lambs and their parents and friends to the slaughterhouse and is the driving force behind the huge ranching and meat packing industries that we have come to know and love.

Please don’t misunderstand me here, I am not about to regale you with a tirade on animal rights and so forth – I enjoy a well-marbled, blood-dripping rib eye steak as much as the next man. No, what struck me when I began to think about the knacker’s yard and things pertaining thereto are the differences between the treatment of the corpses of humans and those of the animals that we eat. A pig, for example, is born and raised solely for its food value; thus pigs and their comrades in the food business are never going to live out their natural lifetimes-they will be exsanguinated in their prime of life. Not so humans; we are born and raised for a variety of reasons, perhaps religious, perhaps romantic, perhaps unintentionally, but none is to do with our being a food source. Most of the time (war excepted) we humans are encouraged to live as long as possible, well past our physical and intellectual primes; indeed, society goes to great lengths to invent procedures to combat diseases with the aim of improving our chances of living to ages long past those that our great grandfathers enjoyed. And when all the known life-lengthening procedures have been tried and we fall into “that sleep of death…from whose bourn no traveler returns”, our corpses are treated with a level of reverence and respect far beyond that which our living selves were afforded (usually). There is never a suggestion of tanning or rendering-no recycling of humans, thank you very much!

On the other hand, is a lucrative business prospect going begging? Just as we have the opportunity of donating our internal organs for the benefit of our comrades who have need of them, could we not offer up our skin (just another organ, after all) for sale to a specialist tanner, perhaps for the price of a interment/cremation of what is left? I can envisage a good market for upscale purses, belts and the like manufactured from human leather. Having a purse, for example, made from the skin of a deceased movie actress, rock star, footballer or royal could carry a certain cachet in the world of the upwardly mobile.

Moving on from ghoulish thoughts and peering out at the real world from our knacker’s yard, one of the more intriguing happenings in the recent news is the case of Anthony Wiener. Mr. Wiener shares his name with a Viennese sausage, a connection which adds a modicum of amusement to the story. This gentleman was a long-serving congressman from New York who, a couple of years ago was found to be sexting young ladies i.e sending them sexually explicit text messages on Twitter. The explicit part of the messages was a photograph of his torso which demonstrated that he was not a sufferer of erectile dysfunction. He resigned his office and went away, presumably chastened. Now he is back in the news, this time as a candidate for Mayor of New York City-what balls! Not only that, it seems that he has been continuing his sexting activity in the interim. I can only imagine that the good citizens of New York will dispose of him at the polling station, but who knows? The US has a rich history in having crazies of all kinds seeking and gaining elected office.

What this situation does for me is to point up the different way that internet activity is regarded from that same activity carried out in the street. For example, were I to dress my torso as Mr. Wiener’s, put a raincoat over it, go to downtown Bowling Green and open the coat to (flash) a young lady, there would be a commotion; cell phones would emerge, the cops would be called and I would be hustled to jail, deservedly so. Surely Mr. Wiener’s activity is no different in principle from my flashing, and yet the only gauntlet that he has had to run so far is that of the national media. Whoever said that fact is stranger than fiction sure got it right!