In a while
I'll be interviewing the mother of Ben Needham. You'll be able to hear her tonight.
When Ben was 21 months old he went on holiday with his family to the Greek island of Kos. But he never came home with them. He vanished from outside a farmhouse and 16 years later mystery still surrounds what happened to him.
Later this month, he will be 18, and today police released an updated image of how he might look now.
How very sad. I seem to recall some of the coverage of this and it really doesn't seem that long ago.
Sadly he is one of many missing persons.
I shall listen to this with interest as I have always been haunted by this case. Such a sickening contrats between how this case was handled and thaat of Madeleine McCann, not least by the media.
I hope Ben Needham's mother gets some answers. 15 years of waiting for news of a missing child must be torture - however do you get on with your life? She was an impressive interviewee.
This is truly a lost child; real tragedy. It's a dreadful thing, and there are so many cases to grieve for as well as this one.
I wonder, slightly horribly, whether if Ben were found he would even be able to talk to his real mother: he may know no English, and have a life so completely alien to her that they'd now have no point of contact at all.
On a slightly less dire note, the 'how he might look now' picture interested me, because in it he has hair that is possibly even blonder than it was when he was a toddler. If this runs in the family, that's fine, but if it doesn't then he might well have quite darkish-brown hair by now. A lot of the cute little fair four-year-olds from my kids' primary school had quite dark hair by the end of their teens. This is even more apparent in boys than in girls, and I suspect that the girls do what daughter #1 has done and use 'help' from a bottle to stay that blonde. Would hot sun have kept him fair?