If something happened to you, how long would it be before anyone noticed?

An odd question, you might think, but if you live alone, even if you have many friends, if there is no-one who expects to see you everyday, each might think you were somewhere else or with someone else; this might be exacerbated if you don’t have a regular place from which you work, or travel frequently.

This was a topic of conversation with some friends a couple of days ago, prompted by a distressing story of an elderly person found dead in his garden, only after the police had been alerted by his doctor when he’s missed two appointments.

It’s something I remember thinking a great deal about in the aftermath of the fire at Kings Cross Tube station in 1987.  At the time that station was on my regular commuting route, and without an unexpected last minute invitation to go for a drink with friends on the day, I would have been at there when the fire broke out.  It felt as if I had been very close; more so than on the days of the July bombings in London, when, also entirely by chance, I was away from the city, although they struck very close to the area of London in which I worked.  There was one victim of the Kings Cross fire that it took many years to identify, as he was a person who had been living rough and estranged from his family; the idea that it could take some time to be missed has struck me quite profoundly then.

So when we were talking this recently, I said that I thought it could be about a week before anyone would notice that I’d disappeared.  My friends accused me of being too gloomy and pessimistic, and then one pointed out that people would notice much sooner than that if the blogs stopped appearing…… and, thankfully, the mood was broken by laughter at the thought of that!