Holiday tragedies like Jay Slater and Dr Michael Mosley show how little we heed Mother Nature
MOTHER Nature can be beautiful and nurturing. She can also be a formidable foe.
As the search for missing Jay Slater reached its tragic conclusion, it seems his death had little to do with all the wild conspiracy theories that surrounded his sudden disappearance and there is a far more simple explanation.
Just like Dr Michael Mosley in Greece a few weeks ago, Jay embarked on a trek across Tenerife’s mountainous terrain in intense heat, became disorientated and subsequently lost his life.
He’s not the first, and he certainly won’t be the last, to underestimate the power of the elements when you are largely unequipped to deal with them.
Jay was only 19 and relatively fit. But, perhaps thinking it was a shortcut, it seems he decided to walk home across rocky terrain which, at around 8am when he set out, might have felt manageable.
But by 8.50am, when he called his friend Lucy Law to say he was thirsty and low on phone battery, the day would have been hotting up to temperatures that, without water or any form of shade, would have been intolerable even for the most experienced trekkers.
Even former military reservist Chris Pennington, who joined the search for Jay, got lost in the ravine where the teenager was eventually found.
“I was exhausted from the heat, extremely tired and couldn’t make my way through,” he says.
As we can see from the videos of mountain rescue experts being winched into the air by a helicopter to escape the “steep and inaccessible” area.
Which explains why, despite legions of people searching nearby for the past 29 days, it has taken this long to find him.
My heart goes out to his poor parents Debbie and Warren, who believe he was “killed instantly after falling from height”. At least they now know Jay’s fate.
Other families in a similar situation are still waiting for news of loved ones who disappeared in similar circumstances.
Gary Tossell, from Bridgend, South Wales, is still waiting for news of his 73-year-old father, John, who vanished after going for a walk on the Greek island of Zante in 2019. A four-week search of nearby mountains yielded nothing.
Deep trouble
In 2013, 67-year-old Roger Bainbridge from Kendal, Cumbria, went for a walk on Antipaxos and has never been found, and David Wolstenhulme, 69, of Skipton, North Yorks, vanished without a trace during a hike on Serifos in June 2021.
At least the family of ex-British Army cadet trainer Arthur Jones, 73, from Denbigh, finally got closure when his body was found slumped against a tree six weeks after he went for a walk on Crete in June 2014.
So too the family of a 74-year-old Dutch man whose body was found on Samos just six days after he’d set off on a walk last month.
Jay wasn’t an experienced hiker, but he was young and perhaps thought a trek across mountains wouldn’t trouble him too much.
But with little or no water, no phone signal to help with a route, the relentless power of the midday sun and hidden drops — he clearly found himself in deep trouble he couldn’t escape from.
And, of course, Mother Nature’s power doesn’t just lie in mountainous terrain. Strong currents in the sea, storms, floods, and droughts — we underestimate them at our peril.
Sadly, it’s too late for Jay, but let’s hope that the publicity surrounding his fate will help save lives in the future.
Daniel is the heights of fashion
SINCE he first emerged out of the sea in those blue trunks, Bond star Daniel Craig has always been a crush of mine.
But sadly, I now have the “ick”, as Gen Z might say.
I’m sure he’ll be gutted beyond repair to hear this. But I digress.
Daniel, 56, has thrown off the shackles of his expired 007 contract with a photoshoot for fashion brand Loewe and the results are, how shall I put this . . . curious.
A formal blue shirt teamed with jazzy trousers, 80s-style Nordic jumpers and a seemingly unbrushed floppy hairdo with a side parting.
I couldn’t put my finger on who he reminded me of – then it came to me.
From Chris Lilley’s irrepressibly un-PC comedy series Summer Heights High (a must-see), Daniel is a dead ringer for flamboyant drama teacher Mr G.
Passed up win
WHAT I know about footie could be written on the ball of a gnat’s foot.
But as a former hockey player, I know that if you don’t take control of the game and aggressively push forward, a team as passionate as Spain will beat you.
And so it came to, er, pass, that our constant tippy tapping the ball sideways and back- wards, rather than forwards, proved our undoing.
Getting to the Euros final was indeed an achievement, but we could have won it.
I know it, you know it, and the players know it.
And in a way, a near miss hurts far more than an absolute pasting.
Climactic end
BEST-SELLING sex guru Dr Ruth Westheimer has died at 96.
Much of her advice – don’t have sex on a first date, have sex before going out to dinner and making time for afterplay and not just foreplay – made perfect sense.
But not so much her suggestion to “play games” such as tossing an onion ring on to an erect penis.
It is rife with pitfalls, not least because it invites size comparisons.
As a friend once said of an ex: “He could have sex with a cheerio without breaking it.”
Dance doubt
HAVING been approached for Strictly a couple of times in recent years, I have conducted extensive research (among about, er, ten people) into what it is actually like to be on one of TV’s biggest entertainment shows.
Conclusion: It’s Marmite.
In other words, they either loved it or hated it. There was no ambivalence.
Who you get as a partner plays a big part, and so too does how well (or otherwise) the time-consuming practice fits in to what else is going on in your life.
It can be a cathartic distraction to help you through loss (Annabel Croft, Greg Wise, Debbie McGee etc) or, if you don’t like having a camera in your face for every waking hour, it can be “an absolute f***ing nightmare from beginning to end” (anonymous).
But whatever happens with the investigation into certain alleged behaviours behind the scenes on Strictly, you can be sure of one thing.
The BBC show is an entertainment juggernaut that won’t be stopping any time soon.
Ip’s so risky
BOHEMIAN Rhapsody star Rami Malek and partner Emma Corrin of The Crown have been photographed strolling along a beach with their security guard following closely behind.
But if it seems like a Hollywood affectation, think again.
For the beach is Ipanema, just off Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the risk of violent crimes such as assault and armed robbery are “very high” (90.57 per cent to be precise) even for muggles.
My friends went there and were mugged during the taxi journey from the airport to their hotel.
Katie's seventh memoir
THE indomitable Katie Price is out and about promoting her seventh memoir, This Is Me.
A grafter, she even turned up for one interview just 24 hours after getting her 17th boob job – this time, a “reduction”.
Here’s what is presumably a post-op photo she posted on her Instagram a couple of days ago.
Yowzer. If that’s a reduction, Lord knows what inflation would look like.
ACCORDING to a former classmate, would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was a “comically bad shot” when he tried out for the school rifle team.
But his skills appear to have improved as a bullet aimed at Donald Trump’s head ended up skimming his right ear because the former US President turned to read the teleprompter.
An investigation is still ongoing, but it appears that 20-year-old Crooks used the gun of his “libertarian” father Matthew, 53, a “counsellor” and “owner of more than 20 guns”.
A sentence that sums up quite how skewed life in America has become.
A COLD War bunker is on sale for £15k in Sedbergh, Cumbria.
Access is via a hatch then a ladder down an escape shaft to the two rooms. Pictured is the “atomic kitchen” in the minuscule sense.
Still, I’ve stayed in worse places on holiday.
THE Princess of Wales attended Wimbledon on the final Sunday and looked radiant. Oh, and there were a couple of blokes playing tennis, too.