189 days to go

People like to shop. They do. And good job - the recovery of our whole economy is based on it. The collapse of our economy was similarly based on it.

And yes, I don’t want to conform too much to type but there are some shopping experiences out there that bring a flutter to a girl’s heart: (some) shoes, anything with the Apple logo and a Flat White from the delightful young man at Jamie’s Recipease spring to mind.

However, there are some items which turn the most hardened shopper into a Scrooge McVoucher-clipper. These are the Unnecessaries. The National Insurance of the high street world. Sandwiches after you left your carefully-crafted lunch in the fridge. Laptops when you’ve kicked the screen in because you left it on the floor. And of course socks. There is no joy to be had in socks.

So, as we’re involved in something of an extreme sport, it should have come as no great shock to learn that sock buying would be similarly extreme. No pack of three for a fiver down the Gap for us. Think closer to what you used to pay for a CD before the EU got all heavy on everyone’s ass. Or, as I said to the sock vendor: “You’re billy-o-ing billy-o-ing me”.

He wasn’t, of course. And neither was Wendy’s sock vendor (see above). And neither were the playful gods, for we have been advised to buy very thin liner socks to go with those socks to stop them rubbing.

You don’t get this kind of nonsense at M&S.


What we have learned:
Far more than we expected about socks

Boot update:
No socks please, we’re British

194 days to go

Now I don’t want to get too closely into the science of this - and there are scientists out there who will be glad to hear it - but it occurred to me that if our main problem is going to be the lack of oxygen, then maybe we should take some oxygen with us. Call me Stephen Hawking.

Look away potential sponsors, but, on closer research (see? just like a scientist) Kilimanjaro is too much of a soft persons’ mountain to warrant it. The cure for altitude sickness on our particular mountain is to come down again. A cure that could be applied for most things - lion attack? Take your leg out of the lion. Doctor, doctor, my leg hurts when I poke it - stop poking it.

Unlike your Everest or other such fancy mountains where the skills involved include knowing what crampons are and how to climb using only a pointy hammer, it’s easy to get back down our mountain. You turn around and walk back down.

But this is the era of Facebook. Indeed of blogging. It’s important that we get our photo at the summit and to do this I don’t think we should be denied access to science. So if anyone could invent a chewing gum that releases oxygen, cut of the winnings to you.

What we have learned:
Oxygen is a drug (see photo). I am fully prepared to do this on drugs. I’m on drugs right now. So are you.


Boot update:
Wendy informs me we are now nasty-boot twins. Photo to follow...

195 days to go

In line with our ‘climb every mountain’ policy of training, Snowdon looms. The degrees of separation between us and people who have done it are considerably fewer than Kilimanjaro - i’ve been in cars, bars and automobiles with these hiking gods - but the separation between their thoughts on it is wide indeed.

There’s a decent 50:50 split between the ‘a mere frolic through the daisies with a slap-up tea’ and ‘abandon hope all ye who enter’. Without seeing these people and their lack of prosthetic limbs, you can’t know it, but trust me, they’re all capable of outrunning an average-sized axe murderer, no worries. So what's with the debate.

In ‘more than one way to skin a cat’ news, turns out there’s more than one way to get up Snowdon. There’s the two hour stroll and the six hour burning, tearing muscles, fighting off mountain lions and clawing at the bleached bones of those who have gone before for sustenance.

Now, I know that nothing worthwhile is easy and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but really, if the view from the top is the same (man), why take a route that is three times as long and 15 times more likely to leave icicles on your eyelashes?

I don’t want to ascend into philosophy, not until the oxygen really thins, but the road less travelled better had load us up with character. And not the heavy type that’ll weigh down our backpacks.


What have we learned:
We’re doing the six hour version
Stairs are the new mountains. Sometimes they also lead to coffee shops



Boot update:
Wearing them while watching The Budget may not break them in, but it’s more satisfying when you kick the TV

197 days to go

In this fast-paced world of 24-hour rolling news, 45-second boiled rice and 8.5-hour train trips from Brighton to Portsmouth, we rarely get the chance to just sit back and well, not smell the coffee (see Starbucks’ AGM tomorrow for evidence of how ALL we do is smell the coffee) but perhaps take time to look at the flowers and so on.

Rather than wait until we’re ill, or stuck on a train to Portsmouth, it transpires that extensive hill walking is the way to go. Slow and steady wins the race and hiking up Kilimanjaro takes place at the kind of speeds that would make the shifting of battle lines across the Somme look like the Anglo-Zanzibar war (45 minutes - the navy was one yacht).

This is a concern for someone with high-level qualifications in walking around London, whose natural walking speed tends towards the blurry-for-onlookers. Blurry with a threat of violence at the edges.

The reason for this is to try and prevent the onset of the madness/vomiting. I, however, have concerns that it will instead foster the madness, not to mention a bought of rucking amongst the London residents in the fashion of Northern Line commuters.

Our one hope is to develop a series of hobbling foot wounds. To this end, we will be hiking from Hassocks to Lewes this weekend (nine miles) in our new boots. Job done.


What we have learned:
There are many, many websites that will plot hobbling walks for you
If you walked at normal speeds, you could get up Kilimanjaro in your lunch break. Perhaps


Boot update:
Almost heavy enough to slow movement to required speeds

198 days to go

To prepare for something potentially unpleasant, I would be inclined to look on Wiki a bit, eat a hearty meal and maybe take a nip of something medicinal. However, as is becoming increasingly apparent on this trip, normal does not apply and the reasoning is that you should do alarming over and over again until, well, until what is not clear. I call it the ‘kissing a frog’ theory.

To that end, we have been ‘encouraged’ to climb Snowdon in July, to familiarise ourselves with going upwards and possibly also the going crazy and throwing up at the summit part. But closer to home, so that we don’t provoke an international incident. I can see glimpses of their logic and, as we will have done at least this Sunday’s three-hour walk by then, we should be super-fit hiking gods who know what to put in each of the 34 pockets in our hugely efficient clothing items.

The key difference to the Kilimanjaro climb seems to be the food. I was warned by someone who knew someone who’d once been up the mountain that you were more than likely to find yourself staring down the barrel of a bowl of pasta every morning. So far, so pleasant, was my thought. It’s not so different to the student pizza breakfast after all. I could see how it might get wearing after a few days, although I assume that the giant pepper grinder must fit snugly and easily-accessibly into one of my pockets.

The Welsh, being wise in so many unexpected ways (and having dealt with their dragon issues years ago) favour something a little more enlivening. Information about the trip is punctuated with references to ‘varied and plentiful’ food, heavy on the cooked breakfasts and two course dinners at local pubs. I assume this extends to waving a pie on a fishing rod in front of us on the ascent.

It also features a stay in a Youth Hostel, something I haven’t done since the German GCSE trip. Presumably we’ll be cutting loose with some ping pong, illicit card playing and accidentally ripping our earlobes by catching our earrings on our watch straps.


What have we learned:
Our insurance includes evacuation from the summit by helicopter. In case there’s no nuttering/vomiting, may practice acting skills to ensure rapid descent to hotel
‘Pyg’ is the name of a route down Snowdon


Boot update:
See above. The first offering to the boot gods.
The trick, I am told, is wearing multiple socks. Of multiple thicknesses. I foresee a need for multiple feet

199 days to go

The great thing about mountaineering - or prolonged walking at an angle, which we will be doing - is that you don't have to explain why.

Let me explain. There's no reason at all to do it, unless the only career plan you have is to tour the motivational speaker circuit displaying x-rays of how your leg bones criss-crossed through your knee cap like so much cat's cradle. Yet people keep doing it and showing off about it down the pub, even though there's google earth to let you see what it looks like from the tops of mountains while you're at your desk wondering why the person opposite you doesn't shut up. Or, for home workers, why the dog downstairs doesn't shut up and will the postman bring anything for you today when he makes his delivery at 12.17pm.

So the stock reason is "because it's there". Fair enough. It IS there. And that sounds pseudo-profound enough to deal with your pub audience.

For us, it was more of an evolution following our 5km Gorilla Run through the City. Admittedly that's the kind of evolution which would see Piltdown Man wake up one morning with the ability to spacewalk without equipment, but never mind. That's why.

Such an evolution comes at a cost in the modern world and not just the cost that keeps the town of Arundel in cobbles and scone boutiques. Paperwork. We have a stack of it and in an attempt to beat some of it into submission, I have been giving consideration to my Tanzania visa. As I seem to spend an inordinate amount of my life on public transport, the obvious first step was to get the required passport photos taken at the train station.

Of course, when getting passport photos taken, it's tremendously important to be hungover and looking like crap. As you can see from the photo, I decided to go for a Kristen-Stewart-in-The-Runaways mullet. Oh to be a visa processor. How we ever built an empire is beyond me, i wouldn't let us over the Channel, let alone to a farm in Africa.


What we have learned:
You can save money by buying trousers which unzip into shorts. Sadly.
Tanzania is a country, not a beauty salon named by Peter Andre

Boot update:
Sunday. Day of rest.

200 days to go

The first rule of Kilimanjaro is not to read other Kilimanjaro blogs.

Two weeks since a night in The Hampton conjured the plan to climb Kilimanjaro, we’re all booked and in the interest of fact-finding have looked at some blogs from previous climbers, most of which are under the category ‘The Englishman who went up a hill and came down mental and covered in his own vomit’. Less research may well be more.

The main concern, apart from being eaten by pandas or dragons or whatever they have up there, is altitude sickness. There’s no way of knowing if you’re going to get it and no way to prepare for it. And while Brighton is ideally located for taking bracing preparatory walks, I am only ever going to be around 5’4” above sea level. According to the forbidden blogs, once you get to the top of the mountain, the lack of oxygen means that, even if you’re still standing, you probably won’t be aware of the feat anyway because you’re staggering around thinking you’re Will Self in drag. While I don’t think we’ve bitten off more than we can chew, it might get a bit gristly.

In the interest of Getting Stuff Done, I went to Arundel today, home of outdoor pursuits (no, it is. the girl in the shop selling sandwiches couldn’t shut up about some guy who’d cycled part of Mount McKinley and kept getting corpses stuck in his bike chain or somesuch) to acquire a considerable chunk of the two A4 pages of stuff that must be dragged up the mountain. See the photo for how happy the guy was to see me. I anticipate the purchase also being mentioned in the Budget on Wednesday as potentially saving the economy. I won’t go into the actual cost, as I don’t want to have to hear about how I could have bought everything cheaper on Ebay. It did clear up why you always see hiking types frolicking around urban spaces in their multi-zipped be-toggled items - once they’ve bought all those ultra-wicking base layers they can’t afford any other clothes.

I was already wearing the boots, having got them in London a few days ago. We’re going to do a three-ish hour walk next week to gauge exactly how unfit we are after it became apparent on booking that everyone else on our trip has been doing lunges and squat thrusts since January. The boot-buying experience was the least satisfying shoe purchase on record, taking over an hour and involving being made to repeatedly walk over an imitation hill in a series of lavishly unattractive boots which failed to complement my business tailoring and red patent handbag. At least after buying the rest of the clothes I now look like an idiot all the way up, not just to the ankles. I was fascinated by the word ‘performance’ on the clothing tags, not something I’m used to. Hopefully I won’t be outperformed by the clothes.

It turns out that my existing clothes have been underperforming for years, even a lumberjack shirt will become dangerously heavy when wet. The only items I have that are suitable are my England cricket hat (aka ‘wide brimmed hat’) and promotional Savills fleece scarf (‘scarf’). We are at least taking the Team Moustache flag from Reading, which hopefully we won’t have gone too bonkerscrazy to remember to wave around. Expect liberal moustache accessorising, I think there are fashion revolutions to be brought to the mountains. It’s not all just a brilliant excuse to eat pasta for breakfast it seems. Plus moustache = cosy upper lip...



What we have learned:
Kilimanjaro is in Africa
Those in the know call it 'Kili'
If you tie your boot laces too tight, you risk your feet falling off like putting a rubber band round a lamb’s tail

Boot update:
15 minutes up a Portsmouth hill meant blister on right heel, right shin aching like billy-o*


*in case the blog is used as a cautionary tale by parents, the role of four-letter-words will be played by ‘billy-o’