All At Sea....

Do you - did you rather perhaps - know of Donald Crowhurst? 'In Deep' the other evening on the television would have given you the story well and poignantly told.

You could call it the tale of a 'Mr Pooter Goes To Sea', but written as tragedy by a Joseph Conrad and not as a gentle hoot. For a man died - suicide most certainly - and many others suffered, his family most of all. It should really have been a story in a book, for then there would have been no real agony, mental dissolution or pain for so many. A 'Lord Jim' and an 'Almayer's Folly' in one.

As a character in a book, you would cast Donald Crowhurst as a fallible Everyman who stumbled, then took a wrong step on - or perhaps rather off - a path, who then found there was no returning but a necessary, relentless continuance into falsehood until the heart, the mind and the soul was in utter darkness. Conrad again.

A fall from grace, as men - though not God - may see it and with that a last fall into the obliviating sea.

He was mired into and in deceit, spiritually and mentally caught in a trap of his own making. Fixated on symbols and portents in his clear madness, appropriate then - intended maybe - that he came at the end to the still slough of the Sargasso Sea, whose corporeal weeds symbolised the chains that bound him.

Does that sound overmuch for a man who faked a journey round the world, who pretended he had raced with others to gain a prize he could never have won? For that is how the world largely would recall and call the man - a fake and a faker. But watch do please 'In Deep' and you will find a far sadder and more morally, humanly complex story - again if only it were just that and no more - of one man, who could indeed have been one of so many, who was in every sense all at sea in his life and perhaps in his death.

There was a significant end note - separate perhaps as belonging to a more readily recognisable world of goodness and generosity, yet in some way - I am sure utterly - empathetic as from one mariner to another, one other sailor who knows too how perilous the sea can be beyond mere physical extinction.

The race winner - Robin Knox-Johnston - on learning of what had happened, knowing too the circumstances, donated his prize money to Donald's widow. That is a fine thought to celebrate when next reciting the Benedicite Dominus.