Karl Bushby is home. After 28 years and roughly 50,000km on foot, the adventurer from Hull arrived at his mum’s house to a hero’s welcome. The Lord Mayor of Kingston upon Hull was there, crowds turned out, and his local MP read a message of congratulations from prime minister Andy Burnham.
It is a remarkable feat of endurance. He crossed the frozen Bering Strait, pushed through dense jungle and swam the Caspian Sea. But as the celebrations die down, a sharper question is being asked, most pointedly by Radhika Sanghani in The Independent. While Bushby walked, someone else was raising his son. So who is the real hero here?
The boy he left behind
Bushby set off in 1998, aged 29. His son Adam was eight. The plan was to be back when Adam was 20. Adam is now 36, and according to The Independent he was raised entirely by Bushby’s ex-wife, Angela.
Bushby made his own rules for the walk, including that he could not return to the UK to visit his parents or his son. The only time he saw family was when they flew out to meet him. Adam managed that four times in 28 years. Adam now has a daughter of his own, aged 12, who has never met her grandfather.
Speaking to the Yorkshire Post, Adam said he feels “pride” in what his father achieved, but that there is a “flipside”. “There were parts of my life where you just need your dad for it,” he said. “He has missed out on pretty much everything in that regard. There was me going to school, leaving school, college, the birth of his granddaughter, me passing my motorbike licence and then my car licence, birthday parties, celebrations, Christmas, New Year’s.”
Guilt, wrapped up in a mission
Bushby has not dodged it. He has admitted “it has been a purely selfish way to be”. He told The Telegraph: “There is a disconnect and distance with family that has to be overcome. It’s an odd one. There’s guilt there. That cross gets heavier the more the years go by. But you wrap it up in that container that is the mission. It’s the job.”
He added that he “squared the circle” with Adam by thinking the walk might give him “more meaning” in his son’s life. As The Independent points out, this was not a financial sacrifice for the family. It was a personal project.
Meanwhile, Angela did the school runs, the parents’ evenings, the sick days and the birthdays. None of it made the news. That is the point.
A familiar pattern
Bushby is far from the only example. The Independent recalls that in 2005 presenter Beverley Turner spoke out when her then husband, Olympic rower James Cracknell, went off to row the Atlantic with Ben Fogle, leaving her at home with their two year old son. “Not one person has questioned his reputation as a dad,” she said. “If I’d said that I was going off like that, people would have said that I wasn’t a good mother.”
Sailor Samantha Davies, the only woman in the 2012 Vendée Globe, made the same observation from the other side. She left her partner caring for their 14 month old son, and told The Guardian that “everyone in the race is a father, but everyone just expects mums to stay at home to look after the kids.”
Fogle himself has acknowledged that it can be hard for his wife Marina when he returns from a trip wanting to have fun with the children, after she has spent weeks keeping the routine going. Bear Grylls has spoken about leaving his wife Shara with their three young sons while he was away for months at a time.
The double standard
Strip away the frozen straits and ocean swells and the pattern is simple. When a dad leaves to chase a dream, he is brave. When a mum does the same, she is selfish. And the person who stays behind, whoever they are, carries the invisible load of meals, homework, worry and logistics with no crowd waiting at the end.
That load is not glamorous, but it is the work that actually raises children. Adam’s list of missed moments is not a list of epic achievements. It is driving tests, school gates and Christmas mornings. Ordinary days are where children notice who turned up.
The dad who chose to stay
There is another way, and The Independent highlights it. British skipper Alex Thomson decided not to compete in the 2024 Vendée Globe after years of spending only three or four months a year at home. He told Sail World that his wife Kate “was the one who made things work at home while I pursued my goals. But now it is time to give her the opportunities she gave me.”
That is not a retreat from ambition. It is a recognition that a relationship is a partnership, and that the space to chase big goals should be shared.
What it means for dads
None of this means dads should stop having adventures, or that Bushby’s walk is not extraordinary. Most fathers in the UK are not planning to cross continents. But plenty are juggling long hours, side projects, training plans and weekends away, and the same question applies at a smaller scale. Who is holding the fort while you are out?
Celebrate endurance if you want to. Just do not erase the parent who stayed. For most children, the measure of a dad is not how far he went. It is whether he was there for the school run, the bad dream and the first driving lesson, and whether the person beside him got a turn at their own dreams too.
Karl Bushby walked around the world, and that deserves recognition. Angela Bushby spent the same decades raising their son. Her effort deserves to be recognised too.
