For whom the bell tolls

Ok. I know it is a cliché. But it will have to do.

I collected a letter today from the Kabal pigeon hole but addressed to me personally (in my capacity as a member of the University Senate).. It was from the University Secretary. Sally Macgill, Professor of Integrated Environmental Management is missing presumed dead in Thailand.

So far as I know all my immediate family are safe and sound. Am in the process of checking up. Not sure if any of my family have ever even been to the Indian ocean shores.

Anyway, never met Professor Macgill. But the University of Leeds is sort of home. And although I would not wish to diminish the lives lost and ruined of those I never knew and never had any connection with apart from “mere” common humanity. And although the University of Leeds is a large firm. I feel the loss all the more personally. A University should be a multi cultural multi national community, and PROUD to be so.

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”

John Donne