Last updated 16:55, Friday, 14 March 2008

THEY are right in what they are saying about Shannon Matthews - I even had to look up her name before I started writing this column.

There’s been a lot said about the difference between Shannon and Madeleine McCann, whose name, incidentally, I didn’t have to look up.

Both are missing, but which one do we remember?

I pray with everything in me that by the time you read this, Shannon has been reunited with her family and has come to no harm.

But those who have been comparing her publicity with that of Madeleine are right. We couldn’t open a paper or turn on the television without seeing Madeleine McCann’s image.

Why? Is it because of class, as some are suggesting? Is Shannon somehow a lesser being because she doesn’t come from a middle-class, two parent family?

Is Madeleine, with her big eyes and blonde hair, somehow more appealing than a freckle-faced, brown-haired girl? Is it because Madeleine was a helpless little girl, while a nine-year-old might be more able to look for help if she was lost, for instance.

I don’t really know the answers and I don’t even know if there are any.

I was reading a list of famous people who died on the same day as other famous people recently and I was surprised by my recollection of events.

I remember clearly the death of Jim Henson, the man behind the Muppets. I loved Sammy Davis Junior, yet I didn’t know that they died on the same day, so why did Jim Henson get all the publicity?

Brave New World was a book that had a major impact on my young life, but did I know that Aldous Huxley, the author, died on the same day as JFK?

Mind you, I can understand that a bit more. Kennedy’s assassination was so dramatic that there are few of us alive at the time who cannot remember exactly what they were doing at the time.

One death that horrified me with its lack of public reaction was that of Mother Theresa. This living saint’s death went almost unnoticed, coming as it did, just days after that of Princess Diana.

I had nothing against Diana and a young woman of her age should not have died, but there we had the Shannon-Madeleine argument in a nutshell.

Diana was young, beautiful and vibrant. Mother Theresa was not young and did not possess outward beauty and didn’t wear fancy clothes.

Talking of death, it was sad to see that Patrick Swayze is suffering from pancreatic cancer. But I was a bit irritated at how the news broke.

There were statements from his publicist and doctor saying that the cancer was not huge and he would continue to work. The statements made it clear that death was not imminent.

It’s no wonder people get hysterical about cancer. Those balanced comments were added as a complete footnote after everyone had speculated on how many hours, days or weeks were left.

When I had cancer my sisters and I used to joke about it. We would whisper the word, distorting our faces into unnatural solemnity at the same time. We thought we were hilarious but we did it because that’s what people do.

Cancer is terrible and too many people die but with every year that goes by new treatments are found and life expectations increase. It’s time we realised that.

It’s time we judged a situation as it was.

It’s time we recognised that Shannon Matthews is just as important and no more important than Madeleine McCann. It’s time we recognised that every death matters to someone. And it is time we recognised that sometimes, if we try and be a little more positive, the sky won’t fall on our heads.

In my column last week I mentioned my childhood belief that blotting paper could make you faint.

Well, thanks to reader Sheena Parker, I have had this confirmed and learned a bit more. Not only could it make you faint but could make you high.

Sheena wrote that the blotting paper item caught her eye as she also had about this and when she got to secondary school the form teacher, who was a published science person, told her that LSD is used in the manufacturing process.

In the interests of science only, of course, I’ll not be available for a while. I am going out to bulk buy some blotting paper!