London Letter: Life is as big a mystery as death

Owing to our rather less than flamboyant financial circumstances, management and I seldom give each other surprise Christmas presents.

A surprise could be a waste of money – whereas when you have a say in one of maybe two presents you get for the year, you know you’re not going to get a dud.

Also, management’s knowledge of fishing is less than encyclopaedic, so I like to point her in the right direction. Ditto my knowledge of handbags.

This year I got a fancy fishing jacket that’s in nifty forest colours which I chose from a sale in August and has been nestling in the bottom of the cupboard since then.

In return, I gave management a pair of boots that she chose during the October sales. So no surprise – but something we both wanted.

However, the biggest Christmas present of all is just being alive in festive times. I mean Christmas is easily the nicest time of the year and global goodwill is, briefly, palpable.

Indeed, the greatest gift of all is life, and no matter how much you say that, it will never become a cliché. So for me the best Christmas story this year concerns a man called Harrison Okene.

Harrison was the Nigerian cook on an oil company tugboat that was capsized by a monster wave in the Atlantic Ocean. It sank to on the bottom 80 metres below.

By some absolute freak, Harrison was trapped in an air-pocket in a cabin. He could hear sharks thudding against the wall as they ripped apart his dead shipmates outside. All he had to drink was a can of Coca-cola.

For three days and three nights he waited in absolute darkness, entombed in a nightmare too ghastly to contemplate. But he had the one vital ingredient to survive. Even more important than the can of cool drink which temporarily slaked his raging thirst, he had faith.

‘I started calling on the name of God,’ he later told reporters. ‘I started reminiscing on the verses I read before I slept. I read the Bible from Psalm 54 to 92. My wife had sent me the verses to read that night when she called me before I went to bed.’

With his last sip of coke gone, his voice hoarse from repeating verses from the Bible, Harrison resigned himself to his fate but vowed he would fight to the end. Then when all hope was lost he suddenly heard the sound of a boat engine above and an anchor dropping. But how would they find him in a steel tomb? Given the size of the tug, it would take a miracle for any diver to locate him in a tiny, fetid air-pocket.

He stared searching in the darkness, and then as if by some divine guidance, his hand gripped the handle of a hammer lying in the corner of the cabin. With that, he smashed through the wood panelling until he reached the bare steel hull, and started hammering.

But still no-one heard him. ‘I heard them moving away,’ said Harrison. ‘They were far away from where I was.’

The first miracle was finding the hammer in the pitch blackness. The second was when one of the divers decided to do a final ‘sweep’ of the sunken boat and heard the faint thudding coming from the hull. He located the cabin door, which divers forced open, and Harrison was saved.

Harrison had literally come back from the dead and such raw experiences forcibly ram home the fickleness of life. Harrison said that he battled to understand why he was still alive while all his shipmates were dead. Why was he alone saved?

Most people who have stared death in the face have the same reaction. For some it goes even deeper and they feel guilty that they survived. Are they worthy of being given a second chance?

Life is as big a mystery as death. Why we are here is as profound a question as where we go afterwards.

The only thing we can control is what we do with this gift.

And maybe that is something to consider when we make New Year resolutions.