Disappearing up your own whatsname

Talking of disappearing, the papers this Sunday have several interesting musings on the tale of John Darwin, the man from Seaton Carew who disappeared for five years, presumed dead, but was really living at home for most of that time.

This story brings the first mention of Seaton Carew in print that I have ever seen. I went to Seaton Carew once, when I was quite a small boy. We went for a trip to the seaside for the day, leaving our little terraced house down by Middlesbrough docks, across the Transporter Bridge and on the bus to Seaton Carew. It was wet and windy, and when we got there we could walk along the seafront and look at .... well, the Transporter Bridge and Middlesbrough. If I had to live in Seaton Carew, I'd be sorely tempted to fake my death and flee to Panama, I can tell you.

Alex Clark in the Observer is reminded of the story of the cabinet minister John Stonehouse, who disappeared from a beach in Miami and has never been found. David Nobbs wrote the wonderful Reggie Perrin novels and TV series, which I loved and which I have on video. He talks in the Independent about the connection between Stonehouse and Reggie (there isn't one; it was a coincidence), but interestingly muses on the phenomenon of disappearance, its temptations, its difficulties. He see it as a male thing, and something of which many of us dream (yes, of course I do).

"When I wrote the first draft ... Reggie didn't even disappear. His breakdown led him to a mental home. This didn't work at all. If a character is going mad, the worst place a writer can send him is a mental home. For drama you put mad people in a sane world and sane people ionto a mad world." Exactly so.

For more than thirty years, Nobbs has been receiving, and answering, letters, all from men, who wanted to tell him about their fantasies of disappearance.

"The element that all these letters had in common was disillusion with their work. It is an unavoidable fact that millions of people in our society are in jobs that do not fully satisfy them, simply because there are millions of jobs that by their nature cannot satisfy a well-balanced but imaginative and ambitious person." You're not wrong there.