Mrs Grylls

It’s Mrs Grylls that I feel sorry for.  I’m sure that she is happy being married to Bear, action man, adventurer, Chief Scout and all round top bloke but her heart must be in her mouth every time he comes home with another apparently hair brained scheme to test his metal and virility.  After all he has form following a parachuting accident that nearly killed him.  She must have been a little apprehensive when he said he was climbing Mount Everest, especially at such a tender age and his back just mended but I imagine she didn’t raise an eyebrow when he announced the every day plan to circumnavigate the United Kingdom on a jet ski or bother much about him rowing naked in a bathtub along the Thames for twenty odd miles.

But she must have been concerned when he came home to say that he was attempting and unassisted crossing of the north Atlantic Ocean in an open rigid inflatable boat, OK he was going with some friends but she must have lost a little sleep at least.  The cold and the wet aren’t a good mixture and so she was probably happier when he attempted to fly in a powered paraglider over the remote jungle plateau of the Angel Falls in Venezuela, the world’s highest uninterrupted waterfall with an eye-watering drop of 979 metres.  Holding the highest open-air formal dinner party in a hot-air balloon at 7,600 metres was probably a walk in the park for her, after all she didn’t have to make anything for tea and the paragliding over the Himalayas at a height greater than Mount Everest would have been nothing as long as he didn’t stray into Chinese air space.

She can’t have been happy though with his adventure to the Antarctic to attempt the most remote unclimbed peaks in the world and when he was hospitalised with a broken shoulder while kite skiing across the ice her life must have flashed before her eyes.  Inside she must have been hoping he wouldn’t go on any more adventures after that and so it must have been hard on her when he let it be known that he was attempting a boat trip of 4,000 km through the ice strewn Northwest Passage, especially when it wasn’t a big boat but an ice-breaking rigid-inflatable boat. Another trip with ice and cold and rough seas at its core must have made her own heart sink.

Don’t get me wrong, Bear Grylls is a great role model, a fantastic character and an inspiration to many of us but every time I see him wrestling with a wild animal, jumping out of a plane or diving into freezing cold water or when I see him whizzing down the zip wire off the top of the Tyne Bridge my thoughts turn to Mrs Grylls and I wonder if she is coping alright.