Author: Ophelia Benson

I love the hairdresser thing, don’t you?

In a splendid return to form, Demos has silenced rumours that it is all thunk out with a proposal that hairdressers be invited to shape local government policy…”Our research has led us to conclude that hairdressers are the most authentic voice on the high street,” says Demos’s Sam Hinton-Smith, “and that they should be given a formal role in urban policy-making.” Not only that. Hairdressers “act as counsellors and social workers”.

The most authentic voice on the high street – really? More authentic than the voice of the fishmonger? The traffic warden? The shopper for dinner and a newspaper and some lightbulbs and a DVD? The panhandler? The market surveyor? The random pedestrian? The non-random pedestrian? The inebriated teenager? The vomiting inebriated teenager? Who is to say which is more authentic? Who, ah, who?

Already there have been protests from street-cleaners arguing that, being both dirtier and closer to the high street, they have a superior claim to being its “most authentic voice”.

Well exactly. And people who actually lie down in the high street and take little naps are even closer.

How authentic is a dialogue that may be inspired, principally, by a need not to offend the person standing close to your face with a pair of sharp scissors (and a disinclination to spend an hour in awkward silence)? Would the conversation remain so relaxed if clients knew their confidences about boyfriends, shoes and minor operations would be translated, come break time, into a raft of initiatives for the delivery of local services?

Oh, come on. If you look at it in the right way, a dialogue inspired by a need not to offend the person standing close to your face with a pair of sharp scissors is the most authentic kind of dialogue there can possibly be. Very existential, very coalface, very gritty and real and down to brass tacks. Not like all this artificial effete superficial dialogue we have as a matter of choice with people who don’t have sharp things in their hands – that’s for sissies.

Words fail me. Human garbage. Rock bottom.

Suspected Taliban militants have beheaded a headteacher in central Afghanistan, the latest in a string of gruesome attacks on teachers working in schools where girls are taught. Armed men burst into the home of Malim Abdul Habib in Qalat, the capital of restive Zabul province, on Tuesday night. They dragged him into a courtyard and forced his family to watch as they cut off his head, said Ali Khel, a local government spokesman…Hundreds of students attended his funeral yesterday. “Only the Taliban are against our girls being educated,” Mr Khel said.

Well there – that’s why they’re human garbage. They dedicate their lives to preventing girls from getting an education – what a noble goal! What a splendid way for grown men to spend their time – zipping around the countryside with guns murdering teachers who have the gall to teach girls – and making the family watch is a pretty touch, too.

The Taliban insurgency has taken a brutal twist in the past year with militants avoiding shoot-outs with American troops – which they usually lose – in favour of targeted assassinations of teachers, aid workers and pro-government clerics. Last month gunmen pulled a teacher in Helmand province from his classroom and shot him at the school gate after he ignored orders to stop teaching girls. The violent tactics, which are concentrated in the southern provinces where a British-led Nato force is due to assume control next spring, appear to be working. Nabi Khushal, the director of education in Zabul, told the Associated Press that 100 of the province’s 170 registered schools had been closed over the past two years, mostly in remote areas, due to deteriorating security. Only 8% of the pupils are girls, he said.

100 out of 170. Well how nice. One of the poorest countries on earth, and the schools are closing because men who hate all females are killing people. Spiffy. It’s enough to make you sick.