Word Watch: August 9, 2025
We've tried to contact you several times as we haven't been able to take payment. You must update your payment details via My Account or by clicking update payment details to keep your subscription.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I was like a tornado going through men's lives': meet the people who can't stop getting married
Forty-two per cent of the married couples you know are destined to divorce, according to the latest UK statistics, but we still buy into the idea that a wedding is a happy ending. The story we like to tell, culturally, about romantic love is straightforward: that there is just one person out there for everyone, and that, once you have found that person, you will be happy every day until one of you is dead. So what about people who rack up multiple marriages? The famous stories tend to have a whiff of madness and glamour about them. There is Elizabeth Taylor, who was married eight times (twice to Richard Burton). The other, bloodier, example that springs to mind is Henry VIII. To be married and divorced multiple times requires a strange mixture of romanticism and practicality about love. Saying 'until death do us part' again, with four ex-husbands still living, suggests that you believe the right marriage might save you. But also that deep down you know it won't. I started looking for stories of serial spouses in the aftermath of a breakup with a man I had wanted to marry, and there was a part of me that hoped that speaking to these people might loosen the hold that marriage has over my own imagination. Why do so many of us aspire to an institution with a 58% success rate, at best? And why do I feel like a failure because I haven't achieved it? Serial brides and grooms might find the idea of marriage especially seductive – but I suspected that they might also be clear-eyed about love, and its limits, in a way that most of us are not. The dream of the perfect wedding, and the perfect marriage, can be particularly hard to resist if you are a woman. At first I was surprised to find so many serial brides on internet message boards. I had a stereotype in my head of the man who cycles through women, trading in each new wife for a younger model. But when I actually connected with interviewees, it began to make sense to me. Anita, who has been married six times, told me that she walked down the aisle for the first time at 18 because she was frightened people would think there was something wrong with her if she wasn't chosen by a man. When her first marriage broke down, Anita kept getting remarried, because to be a divorced woman in the European town in which she grew up was to be a kind of social outcast. A 2019 book by the behavioural scientist Paul Dolan drew on data suggesting that women who don't marry or have children are happier and healthier than those who do, but there is still a perception that single women are broken or unfulfilled. For men, a solid relationship is one of a number of ingredients that make for a good life, but many of the women I interviewed for this piece were raised – like me – to view marriage as their crowning achievement. Marriage is seductive for irrational, emotional reasons – but it is also incentivised by the state. In the UK, married couples are eligible for tax breaks and, in the US, married couples are allowed to use their spouse's medical insurance, so a marriage certificate can mean access to life-saving medical care. Carys, a 73-year-old American divorce attorney who has herself been divorced seven times, was transparent with me about the fact that marriage, for her, is partly a financial proposition. When she first got married, in 1972, marriage put women at a disadvantage: marital rape was still legal in most US states, and women generally lost any claim to shared property in the event of a divorce. Speaking to me via video link from her home office, Carys explained that she kept remarrying because she wanted to prove to herself that she had value, and that she could find love but she was also insistent that a marriage should be about something more tangible than romance. 'If you're a divorce lawyer you're not really so into the 'until death do us part' bit of marriage,' she explained. 'It's more something you do to make yourself financially and emotionally safe in the event that things go south.' Carys has filed six out of seven of her own divorces, and used to keep the paperwork sitting in a file on her desk until needed, like a kind of security blanket. 'As an attorney who'd handled divorces for hundreds of other people, I always felt able to quickly and painlessly escape.' Carys is happily married to husband number eight. She spoke to me anonymously, and doesn't always disclose her marital history to clients. Similarly, Anita, who lives in Scotland, keeps her multiple divorces a secret – Anita is not her real name. Other than her sixth husband, the only person who knows the full story of her past is her priest. Even the people who did agree to be photographed in these pages expressed anxiety about being judged. Serial brides and grooms are cast as unstable and morally weak, which is strange – because the people I spoke to struck me as being unusually courageous. Many of us grit our teeth and struggle on through a bad relationship, or numb ourselves to our own unhappiness, because we are afraid of being alone. People who marry multiple times aren't willing to remain in a bad relationship for the sake of propriety. They seem less afraid to change and to admit defeat than the rest of us are. The serial spouses I interviewed also seemed unusually hopeful. Recovering from any breakup requires a certain amount of resilience. You put yourself back together and try to believe in love all over again. But buying a wedding dress, sending out invitations and saying 'I do' in front of everyone you know – for the fifth or sixth time – requires an extraordinary amount of hope. Many of the people who share their experiences below are currently happily married – so what follows is really a series of offbeat, non‑traditional love stories. They are a testament to the value of the pursuit of love, rather than its attainment – and a reminder that a wedding is never really a happy ending. It's only a beginning. Fairytale weddings do not always make for good marriages. I've been married six times and that is one thing I have had to learn the hard way. I've done his'n'hers matching wedding outfits. I've done exotic-location weddings. I've done the big-white-dress wedding, three times. Sometimes I think I actually used the wedding planning as a way of escaping from the fact that I was marrying the wrong person. The first time I got married I was only 18, and I wore the same white dress I'd put on six weeks earlier for my high-school graduation. I knew even on our wedding day that I didn't truly love my husband. I'm almost certain he knew he didn't truly love me. But I was thrilled by the idea of having a husband and being someone's wife. I have never been religious, but I had this ingrained idea that the marriage ceremony would magically bind us together. I had spent my childhood feeling lonely, and I was frightened of remaining alone. Of course, it didn't work out like I'd dreamed. Husband No 1 cheated on me, which I truly don't blame him for – considering he was 20 years old and we were both clueless kids. My mother went to high school with a top divorce attorney, so I ended up getting a payout. That attorney taught me a lesson that stood me in good stead for all my subsequent divorces: the partner who files for divorce first wins the case. It means you have your ducks in a row and you've snapped up the best attorney. That sounds a little heartless, but you can't get around the fact that, in America, marriage is unavoidably about money. By my 27th birthday, I had been married and divorced three times and I was engaged again. My fourth husband's family paid for that wedding, which was my biggest yet. It was on a yacht and it cost $40,000. I was wearing a gorgeous corset-backed dress with a mermaid skirt, but I remember feeling sick because I knew that even though my husband and I looked picture-perfect we were already falling apart. It had become clear that I didn't really know him, and he was growing colder and more withdrawn, but I felt like I had to go through with the marriage because the invitations had been sent out, and people were sending me gifts. I filed for divorce after only a year. By the time I was organising my fifth wedding my parents were getting tired of my constant marriages. They just said, 'OK, you're getting married again. We're not going to come to this one.' That marriage still wasn't a success, but at least the wedding day was more low‑key. It was a courthouse ceremony, with only his parents in attendance. I was pregnant, which was the only reason I went through with it. I had grown up over the course of my previous four marriages. I no longer had any faith that the ceremony was going to transform us into a perfect couple – but I wanted to at least give our kid a chance at a traditional mother-father setup. That marriage lasted less than a year. At 29, I started dating again, but I decided it was time to be brutally honest. I wrote on my dating profile that any boyfriend would have to come second to my daughter, and that I didn't have much time to spare. I matched with Jonathan, and I remember promising myself that I wasn't going to put on any kind of front. I think I told him I'd been married five times previously over text, before we even met in person. He reacted with such openness. He had this beautiful, soft expression in his teddy bear-brown eyes, and he listened. Jonathan was so curious about me – which felt amazing, because I'd shown him something true. I married Jonathan one and a half years after our first date, and we both wore jeans and T-shirts. The whole thing cost $120. We bought our rings from Amazon for $20, paid the magistrate $40, and filed the paperwork for $60. It was my sixth and cheapest wedding, and happier than all the others put together. I used to dread the everydayness of being in a couple: the bills and laundry. But even bills and laundry can be kind of wonderful, when you're with the right person. It just took me six attempts to find him. The first thing that struck me about Lacey is that she wears her heart on her sleeve. When she told me she had five marriages behind her, I was a little taken aback, but I was more disarmed by her ability to just say something like that to a stranger. She seemed courageous, but also had a vulnerability to her. She had no wall up whatsoever, and she wasn't interested in playing games. I used to find it difficult to tell the truth all the time, about every little thing that goes through my head, but Lacey makes it feel possible because she started us off that way. I had been married once before, when I was 21. It was a very beautiful, elaborate wedding in an imposing building in Virginia, in the middle of these immaculate grounds, but even when I think about that day now I feel anxious. The richness felt superficial to me. My ex-wife and I were always more like roommates than real lovers. I wanted to escape from my home town, and so did she, and we were marrying to give us both a kind of alibi to present to our respective parents. My ex and I had a Catholic ceremony, and there was a moment in the middle where we both had to light a candle. I tried to light mine about five times but it wouldn't work. I remember thinking: it's a sign! When I married Lacey, at 36, there was no fuss. She didn't even wear a dress. My T-shirt said 'I'm her Jack' and hers said 'I'm his Sally', because we're both massive Nightmare Before Christmas fans. Standing in front of the justice of the peace in T-shirts felt so much more meaningful to me than all the fanfare of my previous wedding, because what we had together was real. I didn't feel nervous at all. I had this amazing sense of calm. Lacey may have been married five times before she met me, but all five of her marriages add up to about 11 years in total, which is roughly the same length of time as my first marriage. So to my mind we're even. Sometimes I think about how easy it would have been for Lacey and I to have never met, and it frightens me. We grew up in different states, and if we hadn't happened to have logged into the same dating site at the same time, I never would have known that she existed. If anything, I feel strangely grateful for her five previous marriages, because they led her to me. My friends used to crack jokes about the fact that I was the man who couldn't stop getting married. I've been divorced four times, and there was a perception that there must be something very wrong with me, to have failed to make so many marriages work. I don't think the comments were entirely fair. There were undoubtedly things wrong with me, but I was a work in progress. I've been happily married to my fifth wife, Emily, for decades, and, while I attribute the success of our marriage to the fact that Emily and I are such a good fit, I also think I have age to thank for it. I met Emily when I was 55 and I knew myself in a way you simply can't at 25. I was 29 when I left my first wife. During our five‑year marriage our life looked like a 1950s vision of the American dream. The problem was that it wasn't 1950, it was 1968, and the culture was changing. I was working as a cab driver in San Francisco, and I was fascinated by the hippies I saw out on the streets. People were protesting over the brutality of Vietnam, and reeling from the death of Martin Luther King. I didn't want to live my traditional American life any more. So I became a hippy and joined the movement. My first wife was deeply shocked by the way I wanted to live. We argued about it intensely. Looking back, I see the way I handled that divorce as one of my failures. I wish I had been kinder, but I wanted so badly to remake my life. My second marriage was the polar opposite of my first. My wife and I lived with 40 other hippies in a house with no running water. Politically we were opposed to marriage, and we only went through with it for financial reasons. The marriage lasted for five years, and there were many wonderful things about it – but ultimately we fell apart. Drugs were a part of our lifestyle, and they intensified a propensity I had within me from childhood to feel hard done by. My second wife left me because she couldn't cope with my anger, and I don't blame her. I stopped experimenting with drugs, and distanced myself from the hippy lifestyle – but I was in a state of mourning for my second marriage for many years. When I started dating again, my goal was to remarry. Even though I had tried to reject the 1950s values instilled in me by my parents, it was deeply ingrained in me that marriage was the right way to do a long‑term relationship. So I tried again, twice more, between the ages of 43 and 50. My fourth wedding was a big hoopla because my wife-to-be wanted a huge shindig. I think my family's misgivings about my ability to make a relationship work really peaked when that marriage failed. I met Emily when I was 55, and I asked her to marry me several times in our first years together. She always said no. She is slow and steady with her love, whereas I am an incurable romantic. Finally, out of the blue one day, Emily said she would marry me – and I couldn't set the date fast enough. Emily and I don't try to change one another, and I think that is because we met as middle-aged people, rather than as inexperienced 20-year-olds. We celebrate our 30th anniversary next year, so my friends certainly aren't laughing at me any more. I was 46 when I met Joseph, and I had never been married, because to my mind a wedding wasn't something to aspire to. My mother always told me that if she could do it all over again, she would have remained single. My father was an upright man, but marriage had transformed her life into endless drudgery. I also came of age in the 1970s feminist movement, so it didn't seem safe to me to emotionally involve myself with a man, and lose myself in a relationship. I had deep relationships in my 20s and 30s, but I also enjoyed the excitement of the sexual revolution. We had the pill. We felt so wonderfully free. But, around the time I met Joseph, I was looking for something more long-term and stable. So I put a little ad in my local paper, seeking a man who was 'kind', 'gainfully employed' and 'under 6ft tall' – because I didn't want to have to stretch too much to kiss him. Joseph sent me a letter via the newspaper, and I remember liking his writing style. He also was – and still is – very good-looking. I found out later that Joseph had Xeroxed that very same letter and sent it out to a number of different women who had posted newspaper ads, but by that time he had won me over. It was surprising to me that Joseph had been married four times previously. I would have been less shocked if he had had 1,000 ex-lovers, because exploration of that nature was more familiar to me. The ex-wives seemed weirder, in a way, because they suggested that he believed in marriage – which I did not. But as I heard the full story of every marriage, Joseph's history began to make more sense to me. He is intensely romantic, whereas I would describe myself as a 'careful romantic'. I want to make sure everything is safe before I throw myself in. After a few years I thought: why not? I was convinced by that time that I would be spending my life with him, and I knew it would make him happy. We are deeply affectionate with one another, and cuddle and kiss all the time, even after 29 years together. But, still, falling in love wasn't a mad, emotional rush for me. I was practical and thoughtful about it. Joseph's romanticism is offset by my clear-headedness, and it works. We balance one another out. I ended up getting married five times, a fact that was so shocking to my mother that she simply never mentioned it. My parents never had much money, but they were proud of their morals. I got married for the first time partly because I wanted to escape all that morality. At 18 I ran away to Las Vegas with a boyfriend I had known for five months. I had no money for a dress, so I wore jeans and hiking boots. By the time I turned 34, I had been married three times and divorced twice. I lived in a little town in the foothills of Yosemite, and at one point, all three of my husbands lived within a 10-mile radius. It was an unconventional little community, and we were hippies – but, even in that relaxed environment, I felt ashamed of the way I had racked up multiple marriages. My relationships with all three husbands were meaningful, but I could have simply dated them. I had grown up uncomfortable in my skin, so the moment a man said 'I want to marry you' it felt like the ultimate expression of the love I was craving. Perhaps initially, I kept getting remarried because there was a part of me that wanted to appease my parents. They sent me money for my first divorce, because they were so horrified by the news that I was living with a new boyfriend while still married to my first husband. My third wedding was the last my parents attended. I didn't want to deal with their disapproval, so I didn't bother to invite them to the fourth and fifth. By the time my fourth divorce came through, I was 45 and I had become a professor. I'd put myself through college in my 30s waiting tables. I drifted apart from my fourth husband because I had begun to grow out of the insecure girl I had been. All my marriages ended because I underwent some kind of personal change, or we outgrew each other. Sometimes I berate myself for what I did. In hindsight, I was like a little tornado going through these men's lives. But I'm also glad that I didn't force myself to stay still. I really didn't think I would get married for a fifth time. I was teaching, living alone in a beautiful little apartment in Tahoe, and I was happy. But then I met Gary in a bar and I was smitten. I remember the first time he told me he loved me, I just said, 'You can't! You can't!' I was trying so hard to be rational, for once in my life. My friends and family thought I was heading for another mistake. But Gary and I have been together for 10 years now, so they have to accept it's working out. In fact, we probably wouldn't have married at all were it not for the fact that Gary needed to use my medical insurance for a knee operation. I have always felt secure with Gary, so I wasn't desperate for the affirmation of marriage with him. We moved in together after one week, though – so I wasn't very practical and rational about that. At first, Jan kept her four previous marriages a secret from me. She was terrified I'd see it as a huge red flag, but it didn't bother me. I was 60 and I had two ex-wives myself. By the time she let it slip, I was already completely enamoured. I'd met this beautiful woman and we were having all these adventures together. I wasn't going to let being No 5 change my feelings. Jan really hates it when I call myself No 5. She says it makes her feel like Henry VIII. But having multiple marriages sounds worse than it really is: I've been married three times but I've only ever been in three serious relationships. The first lasted 10 years, the next 15, and now I'm with Jan. Jan's marriages have all been quite long, too. If you put it like that, we're not so bad at marriage. The ceremony itself was very understated. I didn't feel like saying to everyone I know, 'Hey! I'm getting married – again!' I could just imagine the eyerolls from family members. So Jan and I went to Reno, alone. It was actually lovely, because there was a young gay couple ahead of us in line to the courthouse, who were marrying for the first time. Those two women were so full of joy. We asked them to be our witnesses, so some of their first-timer excitement rubbed off on us. We don't celebrate the day we got married. The anniversary of the day we met has more meaning to us. I think if there's something we've learned, with eight marriages between us, it's that a wedding certificate is certainly not going to keep you together. It's the daily interactions that count. I try to tell Jan I love her every day. Jan jokes about us marrying for the sake of my knees, but she doesn't like it when I make the same joke. She says she wants to feel like I chose her out of all the people in the world. Honestly, I did. The first time I walked down the aisle, it was a marriage of convenience. I shared a flat with a friend who was a foreign national during university, and he was in danger of being deported – so I proposed to him. We were married for three years but our relationship was entirely platonic. My boyfriend at the time actually married my flatmate's Austrian girlfriend on the same day, to keep her in the country. It was a double wedding of convenience. There are two photographs of the four of us standing outside the register office together. At the top of the steps we're in our 'fake' couples, but by the bottom step we've swapped and I'm holding my boyfriend's hand. It was an act of rebellion, I suppose. I grew up in a conservative Jewish community. My own parents couldn't stand the sight of each other, but they stayed together their entire lives for the sake of propriety. I was determined that the institution of marriage would be absolutely meaningless to me. I wanted to remain in control, and treat marriage like a game. I married my boyfriend a few years later and while I did love him, that was for practical reasons, too. It was at a register office in Cumbria, and the whole thing was done and dusted in 20 minutes. I had a child by then, and my parents were so horrified by the idea of my having a child out of wedlock I decided that, as it meant nothing to me, I might as well placate them. My second husband and I were together for 23 years, and we had two wonderful children, but things deteriorated. He was drinking too much, and we stopped having anything to say to one another. I'd grown up in the painful silence of my parents' unhappiness and wasn't prepared to suffer through it in my own marriage, so I filed for divorce. There was another problem in my second marriage: I was falling in love with Mike, one of our closest friends. Mike and I would spend Christmases together with our families, and there was always something unspoken between us. I remember one night, New Year's Eve 1988, when we were alone together in the kitchen. Mike lifted me into his arms to wish me a happy new year. He's a very tall man, so there's a solid foot between us. As he set me gently back on the ground, he whispered in my ear, 'When we're 90, we're going to have a passionate affair.' I remember thinking: do we have to wait until we are 90? But Mike was one of those men who believed in the whole 'till death do us part' thing. Single for the first time in my life, at 43, I discovered that I wasn't a person who can enjoy living alone. I find this hard to admit, because I hadn't wanted relationships to define my life. The man I really loved – Mike – wasn't available. So I got married for a third time, on my 50th birthday. That was the closest I ever came to a traditional wedding: there was a cake, and I wore a dress, and I even invited my family. I invited Mike, too, but he sent a bunch of flowers and an excuse about a 'work commitment'. I did have deep feelings for my third husband, but we were always doomed to fail. One evening, I met up with Mike, and he told me his wife was leaving him. We spent the night together, and from that moment on we were an item. Twenty-one years later, it is still vibrant and intuitive between us. I married Mike on the beach in Tobago when I was 56. It was a romantic day, but I only really did it for practical reasons. This time it was to placate our accountant, because we would get tax breaks as a married couple. It sounds absurd to say I've been married four times but still don't believe in marriage. It does, however, make sense in my mind: if someone tells me I can save money and pay less tax by getting a marriage certificate, I just ask them where I should sign. I met Bev for the first time when I was a very shy 17-year-old and she was a glamorous older woman of 22. Bev was an exotic creature in County Durham, and every inch the hippy. I never imagined I would have a chance with her – not least because she was spoken for. I was more at ease around Bev when I got a girlfriend, and grew up a bit. We became close friends, and our children grew up together. We became family, in a way. But I never stopped having an inconvenient crush on her. My first marriage wasn't perfect, but I was determined to make it work for the sake of our children. Politically I didn't really see the point of marriage, but on a more emotional level the vows did mean a lot to me. I hadn't been happy with my wife for several years, but I couldn't bear the idea of upsetting the kids' childhoods by pulling my family apart. My relationship with Bev had always been flirtatious, but even when I was feeling at my most romantic I didn't dare hope it could be serious. When I got the invitation to Bev's third wedding, I felt very sad and I sent my regrets. In the end, my wife left me. When I look back, I realise that prioritising trying to keep my family intact was misguided. I went through a disastrous divorce, anyway, and I don't think I made anyone in my family happier. I wish I'd just declared my love for Bev 20 years earlier. When we finally got together, it was romantic, but in equal parts terrifying. There had been 30 years of buildup to our first kiss. We decided to keep kissing, over and over again, until it stopped feeling so terrifying and started feeling wonderful. You can't always get what you want without hurting people. I wish I'd spent less of my life afraid of that hurt. I grew up in a very strict Muslim culture, but I lived in a western country and came of age in the 90s. I spent my teens watching Pretty Woman, Notting Hill and Sleepless in Seattle on repeat, so I was completely sheltered, and I knew nothing about boys. But I also longed to fall in love and live out my own movie. Islam plus chick flicks makes for an odd but powerful combination. I think that is partly to blame for the fact that I have been married and divorced four times. In my culture, it is impossible to 'date'. Boyfriends simply do not exist. There are only fathers, brothers and husbands. I got married for the first time at 23, after being proposed to by a boy who had never kissed me. But, being intensely romantic, I convinced myself I was in love with him. Shortly after our wedding day, things became strained between us, because when I was alone with him I withdrew into myself. I didn't realise at the time, but I was experiencing depression. My first husband was a trustworthy and gentle man, but we were both essentially children. He had no idea how to cope with this stranger in his home who was suddenly his wife. One year after our wedding day, he asked for a divorce. In Muslim culture, divorce is not taboo. The Qur'an treats it as something that isn't ideal, but is nevertheless permitted. Still in the fog of depression, I became engaged again – just eight months after being legally separated – to a man I met through my Islamic studies group. The leader of the group told me that remaining unmarried would cut me off from God, and that as a darker-skinned woman I would be lucky to find another husband, so I said yes to the first man who asked. He was already married, so I was engaged to be his second wife – in some sects of Islam it is usual to have multiple wives. But his first wife objected to our marriage, and he became so overcome by guilt during our wedding that he packed up all of his belongings immediately after the ceremony and left. I spent the night at my grandmother's home, frozen and mute, and so shocked I was almost unable to process what had happened to me. We never consummated the marriage. I moved back in full-time with my grandmother and tried to start my life again. Despite my continuing struggles with my mental health, I was able to build a career. From an outsider's perspective, I was a successful and independent person, but I had so little confidence. I had this movie vision of romantic love as a transformative force. I met my third husband through the mosque. Again, I married him without ever having been alone with him. That ended up being my longest marriage; we had children together and a solid, nurturing relationship. But I never felt the overwhelming love I had seen in films. After nine years together, I filed for my third divorce. My husband was becoming increasingly controlling, so it was the right decision. At 40 I got my first-ever boyfriend. We went on dates, and spent time alone, although we stopped short of having sex out of wedlock. He was highly creative in a way that made him different from any other man I had known. I promised my family that I wouldn't rush into marrying him. My parents hadn't even attended my second wedding because they disapproved of the way I was jumping from husband to husband. But when my boyfriend proposed after three months I found the prospect of one more shot at the Hollywood ending too hard to resist. Of course, he didn't turn out to be the man I had built him up to be, either. We divorced after only six months together. I've kept that last marriage a secret from work, because it just feels like a blip. I've been alone for the last five years. For the most part I've lost that longing to find life-changing love, although I sometimes miss the impulsivity of my younger years. My life is more boring now, but I'm also a lot happier. I'm going to try my very best to resist getting married again. Yasmin is a pseudonym
BBC News
33 minutes ago
- BBC News
Inflatable warning after teens drift '2.5 miles' from Caister beach
People have been warned about the dangers of using inflatables in the sea after three teenage boys got into Lifeboat said it was called to reports of three people on an inflatable, which had drifted out to sea due to windy conditions in Caister-on-Sea, at about midday on boys, all under 16, were found about "two and a half miles" away from the shore. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency confirmed they were brought safely back to the beach. Richard Thurlow, joint coxswain of Caister Lifeboat, said: "The advice is to leave them [inflatables] at the swimming pools, do not take them to the beach." The lifeboat service said it had found one boy in the boat and two in the water holding on to the Thurlow said that they had travelled about "two and a half miles" before the lifeboat service reached informant of the incident had followed the teenagers up the beach, prompting a call to the emergency services, the service said."I do not think people see the trouble they are in at that time," he Lifeboat said that the job was recorded as a 'lives saved mission', which meant there could have been serious implications without intervention. A spokesperson for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said: "Three boys reported to HM Coastguard to be in difficulty were brought safely to the beach by Caister Lifeboat."Mr Thurlow said the service had a "spell of it not happening for a while" and that he had "thought the message was getting through". "If you find yourself in trouble, do not try to swim back to shore; stay in it and stay together," he added."It is easier to spot a bright orange, yellow or green dinghy, than a head bobbing in the water." Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
BBC News
33 minutes ago
- BBC News
Reepham girl raises £8k selling plants in memory of grandad
A girl has raised more than £8,000 for charity by selling plants on her driveway in memory of her from Reepham in Norfolk, started raising money for The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity in 2024 after her grandad died from a rare type of cancer. The 9-year-old started selling plants from a stall outside of her home last year and said she had raised about £8, said: "We get people usually coming from all sorts of places, from Gorlston, Aylsham and Reepham." People had helped bring her idea alive by donating plants, pots, compost, and grandad, Derek, received treatment at The Royal Marsden Hospital in London, but died six years after he was diagnosed. The charity helps to provide care for patients and families affected by the disease and to develop life-saving treatments. The family said the hospital gave them the "gift of time", and Lucy wanted to give back by raising money for the charity so it could do the same for others. She said: "I am doing it in memory of my grandad... I love running the stall.""We do have to restock quite a bit as a lot of stuff goes quite quickly," she added. She has sold lots of different plants to customers, including pansies, impatiens, and mum, Claire, added: "We are incredibly proud of her. She is only nine."Talking about her father, she said: "They gave him another six years of life, which without them we would not have had."They gave us the gift of time."The stall was open for people to visit at any time, with Lucy sorting her stock out every day to ensure she had enough plants. Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
