Move Over Sir Ranulph

I don’t know why there’s so much fuss about being out and about in artic conditions. We got up to deep snow yesterday and after establishing that He Who Has A Screw Loose wasn’t joking about going walking, we did 13 miles without even considering a team of huskies or a sled to drag our stuff along.

By “deep” I mean about 3 inches and whilst that may not be deep by some standards, it’s the most snow we’ve had for a couple of years. We trudged through several blinding blizzards – granted it was the wind blowing snow off the trees but it was cold and blinding nonetheless, and I had to wear sunglasses because the snow was literally dazzling.

He Who Is The Great Provider found shelter for us to eat our lunch and managed to pick the coldest spot of the whole day. We unloaded our backpacks, opened our sandwiches and poured the hot soup after making ourselves comfortable in an empty barn, before realising that the minus 50º wind was whipping round the corner straight on to us. Needless to say, lunch was a pretty quick affair.

We walked from home to Kingsey, Towersey, Henton, Chinnor and Princes Risborough then caught a train back to Haddenham where we had to walk the hardest mile of all – from the station to our house. Once home, I did a swift tidy, whizzed round with the vacuum cleaner and had the quickest shower in history because we had people coming over and the house was a mess. Whilst doing all this I was amazed and thrilled to realise that I was actually able to do it – to move at all, I usually get home and collapse into an immobile heap on the sofa and only get up again to go to bed. Not only that, but I felt we’d only walked around ten miles so finding that we’d done 13 made me calculate that my “eight mile ache” probably didn’t start until about ten miles. Progress indeed.

Another realisation came earlier in the day, whilst walking across a field with a view across most of Buckinghamshire to my left, trees on a snowy ridge to the right, brilliant blue sky with fluffy white clouds above and frozen cow pats under my boots – do I like walking? No, not particularly – a huge advance on the “no, I absolutely hate it” response from three months ago!