The doctors who treated the Hillsborough victim Tony Bland and secured the courts’ agreement to withdraw food

The doctors who treated the Hillsborough victim Tony Bland and secured the courts’ agreement to withdraw food and hydration said that he was no longer a person.His personhood had gone following the football ground disaster, as if the body in a persistent vegetative state becomes an empty shell. Yet the final days of these people’s lives tell us much of the nature of dying today. On the one hand there is the Christian belief that suffering must be borne with faith and patience, and on the other, a humanist view that people should be taken out of their misery.The tension between these two approaches was clearly apparent in the case of Mrs Schiavo. The final chapter on Cardinal Hume’s death was particularly poignant, but what struck me forcefully was that Cardinal Hume had the kind of death most of us would wish to have.
After being told that he was seriously ill with cancer, and that he had months to live, he had time to prepare for his death, and make his peace with the world and with God. Cardinal Hume, announcing that he was dying, stressed: “Above all, no fuss.” He then retreated from public life, finally dying surrounded by family and his closest associates.If only it had been the case for the American Terri Schiavo, and for Pope John Paul II in these, his final days. The agony of these two people has been a spectacle, a media circus at times bordering on the unseemly, with every gasp, every agonised movement, every moment of struggle monitored by the cameras. A few weeks ago I had the chance to read an early copy of Anthony Howard’s forthcoming biography of the late Cardinal Basil Hume, who was a much respected and loved leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

When you’ve got only three days to cover two civilisations, it makes sense.. Good thinking; let’s avoid the children at all costs, agreed the teachers.The next day we took the bus to Nafplio in the Peloponnese, first capital of liberated Greece and often described as the most elegant town on the mainland, thanks to the Venetian occupation That’s not why we went It was the only place we could hire a motorbike. They’d make a great television double act and not before time. I’m fed up with celebrity historians – give us new blood and some decent ancient historians, please.If we waited a bit before going into the Erechtheion, we’d miss three huge parties of school children, suggested Dr Shepherd. Our Greek guide, tall, cigar-smoking, big shades and a hand-knitted waistcoat, looked more like a mafioso than someone who’s been supervising the Parthenon renovations for the past 20 years.Our group had its own resident guides, Professor Nick Fisher and Dr Gillian Shepherd from Cardiff and Birmingham University respectively, both dauntingly knowledgeable but friendly and good fun. History of art has become so woolly, so dumbed down, so much the domain of yahs and hoorays that if the baby does have to be thrown out with the bath water at this critical point, at least we start with a clean bath.We spent our first day with the teachers. He then proceeded to use a whole lot of terms like methodological philistinism and social agencies which sounded pretty abstract to me, but then I am not a student of antiquity, aesthetic or otherwise.There were predictably passionate pro-aesthetic responses from the audience, but if J Keats himself had put up his hand and pleaded that a thing of beauty was surely a joy for ever, Dr Whitley’s iron resolution would not have been shaken.I admire his stand.

With any luck, these past four days in Greece have exorcised all that baggage for ever.Three years ago, I promised to take James, the ancient historian of the family, to the Acropolis before he finished his degree. We don’t have the same aesthetic criteria as the Ancient Greeks anyway Just ask why it’s there and what it’s for. Come on Mum, cheap hotels, a map and a bike – you know it makes sense.As a last resort, I rang the British School in Athens. And in any case, I was bluntly informed, a week on a bus with a whole lot of wrinklies didn’t sound like much fun. His finals are next month, so unless I agreed to Plan B, ie buying a road map, hiring a motorbike and doing it ourselves, I’d have to shift. You can get guided “Glories of Ancient Greece” coach tours, but they take a week minimum and cost around £800 excluding airfare.