He was a stranger on the television, but he felt so familiar.
Since Michael Mosley went missing on that Greek island, we were with thousands of people hoping that he would be found alive.
I felt like I knew him because I have his Fast Diet books on the shelf. It was his easy style, the joy of the health transformations he gifted people, how he changed their lives for the better and reversed his own diabetes.
Anyone who would swallow tapeworms in the interests of science is very brave or very mad.
Once upon a time, I met up with an extremely dodgy salad in an extremely dodgy dive in the south of France. So, believe me, with the tapeworms Mosley took one for the team.
He was warm and funny in a slightly awkward way, surprising people at supermarket tills and picking out their sins among their shopping with a wry smile.
We keep plenty of sins in our supermarket trolley. Lurking beneath the peas and the broccoli and the strawberries are the Cornettos and the bar of Lindt chocolate with a price tag that’s hard to swallow. The chocolate isn’t.
“One square of good dark chocolate a day, that’s all I need,” I say, to whoever is listening. But it’s never enough.
Just One Thing featured Mosley on the radio talking about breathing and sleep and doing just one thing for a healthier life.
My friend rang. “Michael Mosley is talking about yoga,” she said.
“Everyone should be,” I told her.
His death on the island of Symi is testament to the random nature of life. How a man gets up from a beach on a hot day and decides to go for a walk.
He has an umbrella to shield him from the heat – he has no phone. He takes a wrong path and struggles on, following the wall down to a busy beach but collapsing so very, very close to people and being found and saved… just not close enough.
We never know the “almost” moments in our own lives – the path to disaster narrowly averted. We are oblivious when disaster doesn’t strike.
But there are always people who get that last seat on a plane that goes down, as well as people who just miss the same plane and live to forever tell the tale. A snap decision and in a few seconds, life changes utterly.
When my father died suddenly, I picked up my sister in my car and drove us home.
“I just can’t wait to get home,” she said.
But I wanted to drive forever along dark roads and never take the turn at the corner and swing onto our street; never face what was waiting there.
In Musée des Beaux Arts, WH Auden says it beautifully.
“About suffering they were never wrong / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position.”
He writes about how suffering happens as someone is eating or opening a window. He writes about Breughel’s painting, how the boy Icarus falls from the sky but how the ship has somewhere to go and sails on.
So we turn away from yesterday’s news, unless it is our loss. Small shrines on country roads; faded flowers tethered to lamp posts on city streets tell stories of strangers’ suffering.
Mosley’s death on the island of Symi is testament to the random nature of life
The huge memorial arch at Thiepval, France, carries the names of more than 72,000 soldiers who have no known grave. So many, so very many. All around is hush and the whisper of wind on grass in soft green fields. It is as if that war never happened.
Closer to home, the Troubles are over, memories fade and still we stumble into ghosts on street corners and down dark alleyways.
But these are never our children’s memories. Thank God they are not.