Nobody can simply vanish in this day and age,” said the internet surfer who happened upon the picture of Anne and John Darwin grinning in a Panama property office. Certainly would-be identity fraudsters must now think beyond the propagation of a Rowan Williams-alike beard. The techno-challenged middle-aged, frowning over their sat-nav instruction booklets, might as well just face their debtors. Only someone over 40 would have posed so blithely: the Darwins' sons assumed at first that the picture was a Photoshop fake, an online gag. The corollary to “how could our parents be so wicked..?” must surely have been “...or so dumb?”

Phone messages, an erotic e-mail trail, a colour-coded spreadsheet all but labelled “John and Anne's dastardly secret masterplan”. The Bourne Trilogy has clearly taught these people nothing.

But the canoe case does reveal that you can no longer shed your life by leaving your shoes at the shore. The imagination wilts to learn what it might actually entail: mastery of international banking protocol, eternal mindfulness of CCTV cameras, buying an unflattering hat... It might be less of a faff to remain in one's tiresome old existence.

Doesn't everyone dream of leaving? Buying a ticket to the farthest station, boarding a ferry heedless of the final destination, driving on and on until dawn. In his novel The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland submits that this fantasy begins at the age of 34, when life no longer feels light and free, fertile with possibilities, but overladen, decided, eternally nailed down.

Anne Darwin's performance of a lifetime

Trial for fraud and money-laundering revealed an elaborate five-year-long deceit that fooled many people

Multimedia

• The police tapes

• Pictures: the great canoe fraud

BACKGROUND

• John Darwin's money-making schemes

• Canoe man and Bond boost Panama tourism

• Darwin wife: I wished he had drowned

At 50, John Darwin knew that an average job with an average salary, an average, unremarkable life of vague disappointments would be his until the coffin lid went on. He tried to bulk up his puny persona with scary dogs and a flashy 4x4. His failed snail farms, gnome sales and ill-judged property deals reveal a man desperate to burst through the quotidian, but lacking the entrepreneur's alchemy for making money, that magical bringer of choice, adventure and realised dreams.

There are far worse fates than being a Co Durham prison warder, living in a seaside villa with expansive views of the chemical plant. But some are incapable of contentment. Aspiration, that engine of economic progress, can be a self-destructive trait. I don't excuse him, but I think that I understand.

What is pathetic is how Darwin's assumed identity - at least until he began drawing up blueprints for Panamanian haciendas with room for two maids - was as dreary as his former self. As “John Jones” he faked a limp, mooched about the library and wrote letters to the council grumbling about parking.

By contrast Radovan Karadizic's transformation was magnificent: the epic assumed name, Dragan Dabic, the Gandalfian beard and nutball topknot. How much of a contrivance was his new persona as homoeopath, and New Age saint? Does he really believe, as he wrote in a health magazine, that the number 11 has “extrasensory powers”? It certainly confirms my life-long suspicion that hippies are evil. Perhaps genocidal warlord doesn't provide a good work-life balance and he wanted to retrain all along, like those scary corporate lawyer ladies, who post-kids, pitch up practising reiki.

About 210,000 people disappear in Britain every year. Most are young men - under 30, drug-addicted, mentally ill - but the next biggest group is middle-aged men. Looking at a missing persons website, you scan endless Keiths and Raymonds, Ians and Malcolms. Grey or balding heads, affable, married, 50-something faces with Sunday barbecue smiles. Just gone, no trace, “last seen”. Most will have fallen into financial mires, lost their jobs or - like Darwin - over-extended until the thread of solvency snaps and, lacking the emotional wherewithal to seek solace and scared of losing face, they climb into their cars with two plans in mind - to drive away or feed a hosepipe into the exhaust.

Women dream of leaving too, but seldom go. The matrix of love and dependency, the fear that without us the domestic world would implode keeps us teeth gritted, resentful, at home. Anne Tyler's novel The Ladder of Years was compelling for having a heroine who during a family holiday - what else! - keeps walking down the beach into a low-paid job; a modest life, but one in which she is not battered by others' constant, mercurial demands, and can restore her lost self.

A friend enduring a nasty divorce, would fantasise about walking out: the flat she would buy, the colour schemes and furnishings, uncluttered space. Calm. She never left but this vision outside the chaos and falling masonry sustained her as she took a ball and chain to her marriage.

It seems that Anne Darwin had more to gain from the scam than her husband: besides the money, a renegotiation of her relationship. From being a raven-haired beauty queen when she met him, she had faded into cheated-on victim, patronised and put-down. The plot returned her power, from drudge to active partner. Her husband needed her more “dead” than alive. She held his secret. The subterfuge made her feel sexual, desired: she e-mails him “in the nudie”. A dead marriage turned into an erotic pact, more binding than maternal ties.

Court reporters have remarked that as John shrank in the dock, Anne grew stronger. When six years is up, I bet that she is the one better fixed to invent, finally, that longed-for new life.

Even when his bicycle is stolen, David Cameron grows in political stature. That he was shopping in Tesco Metro, had popped in on his way home for a bit of salad for tea, was a victim of street crime, all heighten his everyman appeal, casting him as a fellow citizen and modern husband.

It is not Gordon Brown's fault that for the past decade bigger concerns have kept him from perusing the supermarket aisles. Just as it is not surprising that a man who rides in official cars talks - as Cameron crowed - of barrels of oil, not litres of unleaded. But it counts against Gordon nonetheless, allowing an Etonian married to an heiress to play the commoner card.

Yet as a fellow cyclist, I'm aghast that Dave fastened his bike to a 2ft-high bollard, allowing the pesky hoodies to lift it clean off and ride away. Schoolboy error! Lamppost or railing at least. Really, can we trust this man with our nation's defence?

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