Just One Thing

It is terribly sad news indeed that Michael Mosley (that's doctor Michael Mosley, of course) has been found dead on the Greek island of Symi, where he and his family were on holiday, after going missing for a few days. I doubt many non-Brits will know who Mosley was, but he had acquired enough of the status of "national treasure" here for his distinctive vocal mannerisms and engaging broadcasting style to be regularly parodied affectionately on the weekly satirical broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Dead Ringers.

Among many life-enhancing advocacies, his popularising of intermittent fasting in the form of the "5:2 diet" has been particularly effective for many, myself included. After I had retired in 2014, I realised that thirty years of mainly sedentary work in an office had caused me to put on more weight than was healthy. I am short (5' 6"), used to have a 28" waist in my college years, and weighed around 70kg (roughly 11 stone). By 2014, I was buying 38" waist trousers (occasionally 40" for comfort) and weighed something over 90kg (roughly 14 stone); not good, and probably rather worse than that. But, by adopting the 5:2 diet a few years ago, I have now lost a bit more than 10kg (22 lb) and several inches around the waist, and hope to get back down into the comfortable mid 70kg range during the next couple of years. Thanks, Dr. Mosley!

It has to be said that this sort of shocking flip from carefree holiday to irremediable tragedy has a particular, almost mythic resonance. The mystery of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, for example, has echoed through the British media ever since 2007. Every year, though, someone will make some simple but tragic misjudgement in an unaccustomed, apparently safe environment that will haunt their friends and family ever after. I think of a member of staff at the school where I worked for a while as a teaching assistant, who was confined to a wheelchair. He had been walking along a beach, on his way to a wedding in Ireland. Realising he was late, he decided to take a shortcut by scaling the cliff, wearing his suit and everyday shoes. He never arrived, but luckily was missed and found. It seems that Michael Mosley's mishap was not dissimilar: walking home alone from the beach, and having taken a wrong turn that led to a lengthy and mountainous detour in blazing afternoon sunshine, he took a shortcut down a rocky slope, only to collapse unseen, yards from the safety of a beach bar. 

However, early reports on his disappearance conjectured a likely fall from a cliff or mountain ledge, with the inevitable speculative hints at a suicide. These have proved false, but I was immediately put in mind of something that happened – or nearly happened – to me when I was sixteen.

In the summer of 1970 I spent the last ever holiday with my parents, a ten-day package in a hotel in Cala Millor, Majorca. It wasn't great – I was behaving like a sullen half-wit with a grudge, as surly 16-year-olds will do – but it did have its moments. There were some memorable group trips, such as a descent into the caverns and lakes of the Cuevas del Drach, and a simple barbecue in a light rain shower, with freshly caught fish grilled right on the beach, raindrops spitting as they splashed the hot griddle. I also had my own room for the first time, so I could slip out at night and sample the nearby bars. Rum and Coke, por favor! Most memorable, though, was one of my earliest and closest brushes with death.

Rather than sit with my parents lazing on the beach, I had gone instead for long, solitary walks into the Majorcan countryside which, away from the hotels and bars, is truly amazingly beautiful. So, one very hot afternoon, I was walking along a nearby rocky peninsula named Punta de n'Amer, head down, dazed and dazzled by the heat and light and lost in my own thoughts, when I nearly stepped straight over the cliff at the end of the promontory. I still recall the shock of gazing between my feet at the waves lapping jagged rocks seventy feet below. I particularly remember the dramatic change in the ambient acoustic: one second it was all shrilling insects, up close and intimate like the tinnitus I now endure, the next it was the vast echoing antechamber of a lonely, painful death, narrowly avoided.

It would have been a true "Musée des Beaux Arts" moment. Out to sea a fishing boat was chugging by, and one can imagine the fishermen remarking (to paraphrase Auden) "something idiotic, a boy walking over a cliff", but sailing on, with a fresh catch to unload. Doubtless, my death would have been recorded as a possible suicide, rather than just a stupid misadventure brought on by adolescent self-absorption, amplified by exposure to peak afternoon Mediterranean sunshine.

The agony and self-questioning this would have caused my parents doesn't bear thinking about; in comparison, my adolescent tendency to behave like (no: to be) a truculent dickhead seems eminently forgettable, if not forgivable. It is something I do think about from time to time, though, along with all the other nearly-was and might-have-been disasters, embarrassments, and assorted near misses that didn't quite happen along the way. We are all like cartoon characters, sidestepping life-threatening perils such as falling anvils, deep pits in the road, and random explosions entirely by good fortune, dumb luck, chance, divine providence, fate, a guardian angel, or whatever other agency you choose to put it down to. The miracle is that most of us don't get flattened by that falling anvil most of the time, although some of us will. In the end, as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his novel V, we simply have to acknowledge "Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane".

I suppose if I had to think of "just one thing" (to use Michael Mosley's formula) that might keep us bumbling along as safely and for as long as possible, I couldn't do better than sergeant Phil Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues, who would say at the end of every morning roll call: "Hey: let's be careful out there..."

Majorca, 1970