77 days to go pt.2

To this...

The UK can often be a game of two halves. Not, happily, like the World Cup and its game of three halves, but a definite split nonetheless. North vs. South. Town vs Country. Guardian readers vs Everyone Else. We are not as United as we seem.

So, on one of the hottest days of the year for the south east, it should have come as no shock to learn that, while all our little friends were sitting in Victorian copper baths full of Pimms, flinging pork parts onto the barbie, Wendy and I would be up Snowdon, visibility hindered by lashings and lashings of rain flooding into our faces and mist that often stopped us from seeing the rest of our group. Not because we were rubbish at walking or staying on paths, y’understand.

Our ‘attempt on the summit” (see? we’re proper mountaineers) was called off with around an hour left to go, just as we were simultaneously thinking “this is a tonne of fun/potential Health & Safety debacle”, but it did give us the chance to get onto the second most important part of trekking - eating a lot of biscuits.

The weekend wasn’t just about testing out the wetter end of our performance outerwear (very good, since you ask. Only casualty was my wallet and its vast loyalty-free collection of loyalty cards. I’m a long way away from a free coffee at Recipease, once again), but also the first time we got to meet the organisers, other people we were going to Africa with and a giant pile of kit.

The people from our group who were there this weekend seem like just the kind of people we could go mad and get covered in our own vomit with (you learn a lot about yourself when you’re sharing a dorm full of bunk beds) and we learned a similar amount about what powders to put in our water and that there are worse jobs than chicken plucking - you could be the porter who carries the toilet.





What we have learned:
It is all about thick plastic bags for all your items. Possibly also colour-coded.

The Diamox vs. Viagra debate rages on

‘Summit’ is a verb as well as a noun

Boot update:
I proper love them, I do. More that I would have thought possible for shoes. Obviously I won’t be wearing them when next in New York. Or any area with a population of more that six.