161 days to go

It’s not too bad, doing your training for the madness/vomiting in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Even if the AA man who has to jump-start the car to get you there comes complete with tales of friends who climbed Kilimanjaro and wanted to vomit all the way.

It having turned out that The Brain wasn’t opposed to prowling the verdant every other day, we thought we’d look into Ditchling Beacon, mythic horror of the London to Brighton bike ride. And look into it we did. From the edge. It looked awful. Almost as bad as the cyclist at the top, chest heaving, standing as though his muscles had suddenly spasmed in shock around his bike. I assume the emergency services found a way to cut him loose, because he wasn’t there when we got back and I don’t think he was capable of getting home on his own, unless he had recently moved to a nearby ditch.

We took the four-hour route around it, which did feature its fair share of vertical climbs and learning why putting your ancient fort at the top of a hill was so effective. When you consider the lack of five-a-day and aerobic exercise in that era it’s amazing that anyone managed to get murdered and pillaged at all.

But, with early summer clinging on, it proved a generally stunning backdrop to fitness, even when you’re checking your Sky News app for Gordon Brown’s apology update(s).As PG Wodehouse would write: "It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away."

With England, I have noticed that what you are given with one had is less taken with the other than accented with, say, a bit of local colour. Morris Men, illegal back-field rodeos, Morris Men. On this walk, someone has studded their privet hedge with the heads of toy dogs. And, as you can see from the photo, there was a gathering filming themselves roaming around with a boat.

It’s all very value-added, proving that the election is never very far away. But, given that this is the second walk in a row that we’ve failed to notice the ‘pay and display’ signs until leaving, this is a bargain so far.





What we have learned:
I won’t be moving to Milton Keynes

At afternoon tea tomorrow I will be having the cream tea. With English breakfast tea.

And yet I’m not tempted to vote UKIP

Boot update:
All this early summer is keeping them clean. Even the cow pats aren’t bothering them.

163 days to go

You can go too far of course. I spent much of yesterday in the big leather armchair snorting chocolate milk out of my nose laughing at The Thick Of It. Today I feel that, while that may be excellent preparation for kicking the Labour Party back into shape after it gets vivisected next week, it’s not going to flex the hamstrings.

So I leapt out of bed at 6am to go to the gym, all the better to be back in time to work before going on ‘a walk’ with my best friend, The Brain*. She duly took me out to Seven Sisters, where we tested both our map reading and hill walking skills, in a prime example of English countryside done up festive with Vote Conservative posters.

The Brain’s motivation for taking me up hill and down dale was, I’m sure, majority-weighted in favour of supporting my training. She certainly doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life hearing me moan about the fake leg I have to wear because I had to saw mine off halfway up a mountain. However, by her own admission, she was itching to see me in performance outerwear. So maybe 80:20 generous trainer to laugher/pointer. OK, 60:40.

Having admired the spectacular setting (complete with dead rabbit surrounded by exchange students looking to supplement their all rock/doughnut diets) I got back to Brighton in time to scurry off to pilates. By the time I had reached the Hove border marker that is Farrow & Ball (don’t let the council tell you the Hove marker is the Peace statue. It’s Farrow & Ball) my body had started to seize up.

For those who favour the Terminator series of films, and who doesn’t, it was very similar to the scene in which the, I believe, T-1000, is caught in a pool of molten metal, but continues to struggle forwards, limbs fusing and snapping, until it is merely metal crumbs leading to a sinister flexing finger.

Happily pilates was able to make me more liquid metal, less like the casts of those poor chaps from Vesuvius.



*Apart from Wendy, who is culpable in this whole adventure**, everyone who comes into contact with us will remain nameless, thus protecting the innocent. What constitutes ‘innocent’ will of course remain open to interpretation

**/debacle, delete as applicable


What we have learned:
The Brain also bought me a trekker’s guide to Kilimanjaro. A generous act, for which I give thanks, but I’m not sure the massive photo of a plaque commemorating a climber who died of altitude sickness was necessary
If you build your house on a cliff, the government may not act as insurer
Check out the shade of performance trouser. Wherever that is effective camouflage must be the most boring place on earth.


Boot update:
I kept my coveting of The Brain’s broken-in boots to myself, for fear of boot reprisals

165 days to go

I woke up this morning with a pressing need to blow the cobwebs away. And for ‘cobwebs’ you can read ‘stinking hangover’. Billy-oing students. As I considered my options from my vantage point face down in bed, the eyes of a judgmental cat boring into the back of my head, I suspected that bacon sandwich/writing a feature about hotel check-in machines might not cut it.

I was also aware that, with the average British summer lasting around 72 hours - much of that at night - if I wanted to remedy the truckers’ tan that I acquired last week going east to west along the South Downs, I was going to have to get onto it.

A mere several hours later I found myself walking west to east, all the better to even up the scorching. All the better having managed to avoid last week’s adventure along the hard shoulder of the A273 too. What I also discovered was that, much as you can’t traverse Mayfair without bumping into a member of the hotel financing community, neither can you walk along the Downs.

When I wasn’t discussing RBS’s labyrinthine corporate structure, I considered to myself the international language of backpack wearing. Here in Brighton, we are not quite a multicultural haven in the manner of, say, the Green Lanes, but we do have an awful lot of French people rocking up every summer. And good luck to them. I can’t imagine what the Gallic palate makes of Brighton rock and deep-fried doughnuts, but they seem to enjoy it. And how do I know that these doughnut-eaters are French? They’re wearing their backpacks over both shoulders.

It’s better for the back, I know, but for the English, it’s something of an anathema. However, in this, the performance-outwear devotee has come over all Continental. And not just over both shoulders, but with a little strap that attaches across the front. Over the whole 11 miles, I didn’t see a single moment of jaunty one-shoulder action.

I decided to compromise - one shoulder in the city and car park areas, two shoulders after checking carefully for other people and in front of sheep. I’m happy to be part of the EU, but I’m not ready to join the Euro just yet.



What we have learned:
You know how trees at the top of hills are all slanted from the constant wind? That happens to your hair on the Downs
Confused hikers can rest assured that, if they don’t know what a sheep is, there are handy pictures
Scotch eggs are back


Boot update:
Carrying a pack of Compeed all the time is to blisters what carrying an umbrella is to keeping the sun shining. Thus far
Actual mud touched them today. They look marginally more credible

171 days to go

In my line of work you learn that great wisdom comes from unexpected places. Do not discount the 16-year-old in the Elvis wig and jumpsuit or the lawyer in the tailored suit. One can teach you how to keep your hair glossy using only iced water and the other may well have top tips on getting discounts on circus acts.

I had, I admit, snapped my mind closed on sources of hiking knowledge. People who hiked and people who hiked plus sold performance outerwear were my fonts, like the fascist I am. However, after our first real-life outdoor adventure today, I see that I should be getting myself onto some trucker websites. Not for the tips on long-distance travel, or coping with minimal amounts of sleep while possibly under the influence of assorted narcotics, but for what to do with ‘truckers’ arm’.

Yup. It transpires that, if you walk east to west in the middle of the day from Lewes to Hassocks along the ridge of the Downs, you will pick up a rosy glow, but just on the one side. The obvious answer would be to turn around and stroll the 11 miles back to baste the other side, but having expertly prepared for today’s hike by going to a gig in the London and then getting four hours’ sleep the night before, that was less of an option.

Fortunately there’s a spray tan place at the end of the road - I’ll stick one half in and get them to turn it up to ‘toasted’.

That dealt with, I am shocked to report that, until I wake up tomorrow frozen in position like so many railway sleepers, we seem to have got away with our first practice run. No blisters, no animal attacks, no madness/vomiting.

OK, so it took us an alarming amount of time to find our way out of Lewes, with a map. And we had to ask a man where the prison was, while standing in front of a sign saying ‘prison’ next to a large stone building accessorised with razor wire. And we may have taken a wrong turn outside Hassocks and had to dive in and out of the bushes along the A273 while walking around an endless blind corner.

The only disappointment came in the lack of injuries, after I conjured the lines yesterday:

How are your calves?
Like they only just escaped the veal crate in time

It would have felt good to work them in. Wendy said hers hurt a bit, but I know she was just humouring me.


What we have learned:
Scampi is not a fish, but a type of lobster, or method of preparing fish

Boot update:
11 miles over open country and apart from a light dusting, not a mark on them. If we’re going to be taken seriously by other hiking/climbing/walking-at-an-angle aficionados we’ll have to leave them out in the road for a few weeks to break them in.

179 days to go

I’m currently reading The Trouble With Markets by the hugely-entertaining, if a little doom-y economist, Roger Bootle. It’s marvellous in many ways, not just because he once told me that my Queen of Hearts theory of the downturn was “probably about right maybe anyway I’ve got to go over there” and so every time I turn the page I think I’m going to see it mentioned without my consent and can sue.

The main joy of the book is Bootle’s bracing way with words. When he’s not being staggered by the antics of the Japanese economy, he’s distributing ‘ghastly’ and ‘topsy’ (“private equity expanded like topsy”) around the place like Sir Ranulph Fiennes eating lashings of hard-boiled eggs with ginger beer on a warm summer’s day at a cricket match outside Cirencester (speaking of Fiennes and his influence on our own trip - fingerless gloves: yes. Fingerless hands: no).

Having already eschewed the more festive sections of the English dictionary on this no-watershed blog, it occurred to me that Bootle and Fiennes might be onto something with their linguistic choices. During the more madness/vomiting moments, what could be more reviving than a dash of “well, must buck up” and “huzzah! pasta for breakfast!”?

Plus, we’ll be English folk in Africa. Top hole!


What we have learned:
Nothing about the Queen of Hearts theory. I shouldn’t even have told the Bootle
It’s OK, I’m reading the new Modern Toss too

Boot update:
The long laces have encouraged the cat to use them as maypoles

180 days to go

Now this is going to come as a shock to those of you with eyes, but I’m no slave to fashion. OK, so I read InStyle and I’ll pick up Vogue in the hairdressers (well, the alternative is Heat) but jeggings? Really? No.

As you will have noted in this blog, following fashion isn’t really a priority in the climbing world, which is troubling, even to someone who has no intention of buying a shiny grey suit with 3/4 length sleeves just because the 80s are back.

I don’t understand why this should be. It’s perfectly possible not to look like a Grade A billy-o on the ski slopes, where you’re basically strapping bits of duvet to yourself, and skateboarding clothing has been on the catwalk (I know, I read Vogue). So why, when it’s just trousers and tops, can’t there be options other than beige? Beige with odd sagging.

Solutions, not problems, as problem-causing line managers tend to say and here at two-go-mad-up-a-mountain we’re prepared to see this as an opportunity to fill the vacuum and be trend setters. As mentioned last month, we will be taking our moustache-theming from last year’s Reading festival beyond badges and flags, to every possible realm. My sister gave me a lovely pair of ‘tache earrings last week and today I took delivery of two moustache bandanas, for myself and Wendy.

The terrible thing about being a two-person trend, however, is that we look like twins. Potentially idiot twins and not dissimilar to those poor twins seen weeping in supermarket aisles because their parents have dressed them in the same clothes. And to what end? I hear having twins is the fastest possible way to lose all your sleep. Faster even than suspending a beef joint just out of reach of next door’s dog. Surely with all that sleep deprivation you’re at risk of double vision anyway, why ram the point home?

The bonus for us is that, should one of us succumb to the madness/vomiting, the other one can stand in for all the photos. Genius.



What we have learned:
Skateboarding is a sport
Wendy’s bandana is black
The 80s are so not back

Boot update:
The four socks have been tucked into the boots in preparation for next week’s rescheduled walk

188 days to go

Never one to shy away from a multitasking opportunity, I saw the inclement Easter weather, matched it to my need to go outside and identified an opportunity to test-drive my performance outerwear (sadly my hugely palatable snowboarding jacket Just Won't Do).

Not since technology advanced to allow you to personalise your desktop have options been so overwhelming. But for the unreasonably demanding nature of public transport, I would still be varying the widths of cuffs, bending the peak of the hood or considering any number of venting options.

After blocking off a suitable chunk of my diary to deal with these issues, I headed cautiously for the station, aware that wearing anything remotely linked to the cagoule family was likely to conjure a parade of friends and acquaintances eager to judge my fashion crimes.

I had nothing to fear, however, as the hood dropped so far down my face that only aficionados of my nose tip would have been able to pick me out of a line-up.

This is not to criticise the manufacturers, fine, upstanding lot I'm sure - they advertise in the Telegraph after all - but more my freakishly small head. Seriously, I'm amazed I can even remember my PIN number.

Reverse bobble-head aside, Wendy pointed out that I have now transformed into the midget from Don't Look Now. I had no idea what she was talking about - I don't watch scary movies. Called it Don't Look Now? I can take the hint. A quick google confirmed that yes, I now look like a murderous midget (top tip - don't search 'murderous midget' on public transport unless your fellow travellers look like they might get a kick out of you screaming and vaulting backwards over the seats). At least this should help deal with the panda/dragon threat.

Having made it to dry land and been generally appalled by the reflections in shop windows, my science friend, who has a vast collection of performance items (including the near-mythical 'normal-looking black base layer'), had the audacity to ask: "did it keep you dry?"

Yes *sulk*

What we have learned:
Personalised desktops? Yes, that's right, I'm old

My sister is knitting me a hat out of qiviut - musk ox underhair - the warmest substance known to man that can't also be used as a weapon. More importantly than the heat, it will help fill the hood

Boot update:
Wendy was planning on wearing hers to pop out at lunchtime. That I haven't heard from her yet bodes ill