Coming to terms with your tragic loss? Try a Caribbean grief cruise

When the Rev Richard Coles’s husband David died in 2019, a woman took him by the arm and told him: ‘no one will ever be as nice to you as now — so make the most of it.’

Bereavement is a peculiar experience, and rarely what anyone expects it to be. Good Grief (C4) attempted to reflect that by sending the retired vicar for a series of improbable therapies, from laughter yoga to communing with alpacas.

Richard, who long ago was a pop star with The Communards, began by dismissing the conventional wisdom that grief comes neatly packaged in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining and so on.

And he chortled when a U.S. therapist, Mitch Carmody, declared: ‘When people say time heals all things, I want to punch them. It’s what you do with the time that is the healer.’

Richard and Mitch were on a ‘grief cruise’ in the Caribbean, which was one of the more appealing ways to come to terms with loss.

It’s hard to believe that many people want to commemorate a loved one by indoor skydiving or surfing with a wave machine. ‘I look like a walrus dressed in a spacehopper,’ Richard complained, as he pulled on his orange wetsuit.

But he clearly enjoyed a night-time game of crazy golf on board an ocean liner.

‘This is like taking your mourning to a funfair,’ he said — demonstrating again his nifty turn of phrase.

The pace was fairly frenetic. One day he was on the Isle of Bute at a widow’s retreat, writing verses to be set to music. The next, he was on a farm in the Cotswolds, confiding his sorrows to a group of alpacas called Milo, Jethro and Bruno. no one mentioned it, but the alpacas probably had sorrows of their own.

It’s not so long since one of their woolly brethren, named Geronimo, was taken from a nearby farm and bumped off by Ministry vets, on suspicion of having tuberculosis.

The autopsy showed Geronimo was TB-free, but it was too late by then. Anyway, you couldn’t blame the alpacas for feeling a bit low themselves. It’s sometimes helpful to remember, when grief lays you low, that others might secretly be suffering, too.

For Richard, once a day for ten minutes, grief means laughing uproariously on the phone with a yoga teacher, to stir up endorphins, the ‘happy hormones’.

Poor Tamara ecclestone, daughter of the F1 billionaire Bernie, was short of happy hormones after burglars got away with £25 million of jewellery from her home.

Who Stole Tamara Ecclestone’s Diamonds? (BBC1) investigated the crime and a string of related break-ins.

The thieves were part of an inept gang from Italy and Romania. Police cracked the case after one of them sent an obscene photo from his mobile, revealing not only his genitals but his phone number to detectives.

But this documentary, first aired on BBC3, failed to ask some crucial questions. The gang were able to break into ecclestone’s mansion in Kensington, while Tamara’s family was on holiday, without setting off the alarm system — how?

The door to the strongroom where she kept a lifetime of baubles was left unlocked — whose fault was that? And where was the security guard, supposed to be protecting the house?

no doubt there are perfectly simple and plausible answers to these questions. I’m not suggesting otherwise, Your honour.

It just seems a pity to go on hols and leave the jewellery vault open. She won’t make that mistake again.