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LEJOG Postscript

It’s hard to believe, but it is just over a week since I arrived home! My journey is gradually beginning to fade, but there are all sorts of little reminders; for instance the last blister plaster came off this morning! It has been very special indeed to be reunited with Veronica.  Both daughters have been around to visit and it has been delightful to see them. Still, I wake up in the middle of the night, wondering where the loo is in this B&B and suddenly realise that it is in a very familiar place, and that person next to me is very familiar as well! I lost a stone (6.4kg, 14lbs) on my journey but the test will be to see whether I can keep the weight off!

For some reason, the last blog post of my journey did not get distributed to those people who had subscribed by email. I received a number of emails asking whether Veronica ran me over on the last leg!! I’m pleased to report that the oversight was nothing more than another glitch at Google and it gave me an excuse to write this very final post, just to round the whole thing off. 

In my very nerdy way, I have spent a couple of days analysing the statistics of the journey and I thought I might share these with you for better or for worse.  I decided that it might be of interest to split the journey by the type of walk rather than just the region, so differentiating between the National Trails and the Roadwork, as well as some regional information. You will need to click on each graph to see the detail, if you are at all interested!

But first, in case you didn’t see that final post on the internet, here is the proof that I made it!

And here is a visual summary of the whole journey. If you look at the picture above you will see that the shortest route from LE to JOG is 874miles. My journey was 1202 miles and in the map below you can see quite clearly that the deviations to do the National Trails added more than 300miles to the journey.

The individual flags on the map each represent daily waypoints, actually the location of the B&B for each night.

(The data in the graphs immediately below are all metric. If you are more of an Imperial persuasion, please move down the post to the end of the metric commentary, whereafter I have duplicated all the information in Imperial Units)

Unsurprisingly, the total distance walked correlates closely with the number of days on each phase of the journey. South West England and the Pennine way together made up almost 50% of the total distance and Scotland around a third.

From the beginning I thought that I would average about 16km (10mi) per day, hoping that as I got fitter and stronger, the distances would increase. In my training exercises, I remember feeling tired after as little as 10km (6mi), and wondering how I would cope with much longer distances with a full pack. As it turned out, I did manage the expected distances and over time, they did increase. The trend line in the graph above shows this quite clearly. Though to be honest, the graph also shows that when the distances were pre-ordained such as on the national trails, I did do longer distances, but when the choice was my own, I backed off! Pah!!

This graph doesn’t show very much!  In fact all it shows is how much I climbed and descended which turned out unsurprisingly to be closely correlated with the distances I walked (see above!)! I included it only because, as I said in the previous post, it does show a lot of climbing and descending!

This graph is a little more interesting! First, it shows that the National Trails were in general more demanding, which isn’t surprising, though what did surprise me is that the roadwork wasn’t that far behind. I was staggered by the statistics for the Pennine Way. In my recollection, there were lots of ups and downs all through the Pennine Way, whereas one would have thought that the walk along the coast of North East Scotland would have been as flat as a pancake!  Not so! They turned out to be much the same. What was also very surprising was that the walk along the Great Glen Way, which one would have expected to be all very flat given that it was supposed to be along canals and lochs, turned out to be really quite hilly! I was also surprised that Offa’s Dyke and the West Highland Way were much the same! You would have thought that having done the walk myself, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised by these statistics, but it just goes to show!!

The trend lines in this graph show that I walked faster as I got fitter, and more interestingly, that I took fewer rest periods along the way as time progressed.  My gadget was unforgiving in that it regarded every stop along the way, to take a photo or a pee, to look at my map or the view, as a definite stop. Of course it also had a negative view about lunch stops or tea breaks.  The stats show that as time progressed, I became fixated on just keeping walking (the difference between the total time and the walking time reduced). This was partly due to increased fitness and partly due to Scottish midges, though they were far less of a problem than I had anticipated. The major reason was that I grew comfortable with the walk and just liked to keep plodding on. Strange really!

This graph slices and dices the information in a different way. Here I have taken the same information but looked at it on the basis of National Trails vs. Roadwork. I have to assume no-one reading this blog will be silly enough to do the the whole of LEJOG, but they might be interested in the comparison. It shows that the total amount of roadwork was not significantly greater than the total time on the Trails, either in terms of distance or days, though because I was lazier on the roads, they did take proportionately more time.

It also shows that I did  walk larger distances on the Trails and I did climb higher on the Trails, none of which is surprising!

Finally, for those who didn’t see the last post, here is the weather postcast!  Again, it doesn’t show very much, other than how lucky I was to choose the driest April in recorded history to start my walk and that this luck persisted into Scotland, when the really wet weather went south. It also shows Wales and Northern England were wetter! I actually got drenched to the skin on only about six days, which unsurprisingly correlates very closely to the number of days that I spent walking with Englishmen (or women!). Quod erat demonstrandum! (OK, I do admit that they weren’t always with me on the the really wet days, but they are devious enough to confuse the weather a little!!)

And now, having presumed to take up so much of your time over so lengthy a period, it is time to close this Blog. I can only reiterate that this entire journey would have been so much lonelier without your participation, both in the comments and in the private emails. You will understand that seeing Veronica at Journey’s End was just wonderful, but somehow I feel that the whole thing would have been empty without your participation. Thank you!!

(As I promised, the Imperial data follows!)

Unsurprisingly, the total distance walked correlates closely with the number of days on each phase of the journey. South West England and the Penine way together made up almost 50% of the total distance and Scotland around a third.

 From the beginning I thought that I would average about 16km (10mi) per day, hoping that as I got fitter and stronger, the distances would increase. In my training exercises, I remember feeling tired after as little as 10km (6mi), and wondering how I would cope with much longer distances with a full pack. As it turned out, I did manage the expected distances and over time, they did increase. The trend line in the graph above shows this quite clearly. Though to be honest, the graph also shows that when the distances were pre-ordained such as on the national trails, I did do longer distances, but when the choice was my own, I backed off! Pah!!

This graph doesn’t show very much! In fact all it shows is how much I climbed and descended which turned out unsurprisingly to be closely correlated with the distances I walked (see above!)! I included it only because, as I said in the previous post, it does show a lot of climbing and descending!

 This graph is a little more interesting! First, it shows that the National Trails were in general more demanding, which isn’t surprising, though what did surprise me is that the roadwork wasn’t that far behind. I was staggered by the statistics for the Pennine Way. In my recollection, there were lots of ups and downs all through the Pennine Way, whereas one would have thought that the walk along the coast of North East Scotland would have been as flat as a pancake! Not so! They turned out to be much the same. What was also very surprising was that the walk along the Great Glen Way, which one would have expected to be all very flat given that it was supposed to be along canals and lochs, turned out to be really quite hilly! I was also surprised that Offa’s Dyke and the West Highland Way were much the same! You would have thought that having done the walk myself, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised by these statistics, but it just goes to show!!

The trend lines in this graph show that I walked faster as I got fitter, and more interestingly, that I took fewer rest periods along the way as time progressed. My gadget was unforgiving in that it regarded every stop along the way, to take a photo or a pee, to look at my map or the view, as a definite stop. Of course it also had a negative view about lunch stops or tea breaks. The stats show that as time progressed, I became fixated on just keeping walking (the difference between the total time and the walking time reduced). This was partly due to increased fitness and partly due to Scottish midges, though they were far less of a problem than I had anticipated. The major reason was that I grew comfortable with the walk and just liked to keep plodding on. Strange really!

The other interesting observation is that I clearly walked more slowly on the National Trails than on the roads. This is not surprising. Often on the National Trails, I was walking with other people, and their pace governed mine, but also, the National Trails involved many more ups and downs and as Mr Naismith decreed many posts ago, this will always slow you up. What interests me is that by the time I got to the Great Glen Way, I was just going for it! I tried to persuade myself that I should stay in the moment and appreciate everything along the way from start to finish, but maybe I turned out to be human after all! The end was nigh, I was fitter and I was going for it! By the time I got to North East Scotland, I was flying, despite the ups and downs. Clearly, I wanted to be reunited with Veronica!

This graph slices and dices the information in a different way. Here I have taken the same information but looked at it on the basis of National Trails vs. Roadwork. I have to assume no-one reading this blog will be silly enough to do the the whole of LEJOG, but they might be interested in the comparison. It shows that the total amount of roadwork was not significantly greater than the total time on the Trails, either in terms of distance or days, though because I was lazier on the roads, they did take proportionately more time.

It also shows that I did walk larger distances on the Trails and I did climb higher on the Trails, none of which is surprising!

Finally, for those who didn’t see the last post, here is the weather postcast! Again, it doesn’t show very much, other than how lucky I was to choose the driest April in recorded history to start my walk and that this luck persisted into Scotland, when the really wet weather went south. It also shows Wales and Northern England were wetter! I actually got drenched to the skin on only about six days, which unsurprisingly correlates very closely to the number of days that I spent walking with Englishmen (or women!). Quod erat demonstrandum! (OK, I do admit that they weren’t always with me on the the really wet days, but they are devious enough to confuse the weather a little!!)

And now, having presumed to take up so much of your time over so lengthy a period, it is time to close this Blog. I can only reiterate that this entire journey would have been so much lonelier without your participation, both in the comments and in the private emails. You will understand that seeing Veronica at Journey’s End was just wonderful, but somehow I feel that the whole thing would have been empty without your participation. Thank you!!

LEJOG Day 93: Keiss to John o’Groats; Statistics

Weather: Cloudy with gentle northerly

Distance covered today: 14.6km (9.1mi)

Last night’s B&B: Sinclair Bay Hotel (£45)

Cumulative distance: 1934.0km (1201.7mi)/ % Complete: 100.0%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 93 (click!)

Journey’s End

In the tables which follow, the headings refer to the following geographic areas:

SW England: Land’s End to the Bristol Channel, including Cornwall, Devon and Somerset

Wales: This refers essentially to Offa’s Dyke, some of which is in England, but for simplicity’s sake, I have grouped the whole of this part of the trail as “Wales”. It includes the tongue of land that is Wales sticking into England in the north.

N England: This includes the cross-country bit that took me to the start of the second leg of the Pennine Way and then all the way up the Pennine Way until I left England after Byrness to follow the Roman Road of Dere Street into Scotland

Scotland: Obviously this refers to the rest of the journey, including the route across Scotland from Jedburgh to Milngavie, up the West Highland Way, across the Great Glen and then up the A9 (and A99) from Inverness to John o’Groats

Metric	SW England	Wales	N England	Scotland	Overall
Total Distance (km)	466	257	487	724	1934
Avg daily dist (km)	18.6	21.4	20.3	22.6	20.8
Walking Days	25	12	24	32	93
Total Up (m)	16918	11044	17915	27103	72979
Total Down (m)	16995	11091	17625	27411	73122
Avg Up (m/per day)	677	920	746	847	785
Avg Down (m/per day)	680	924	734	857	786
Avg speed walking (km/h)	4.6	4.2	4.5	4.9	4.6
Avg speed overall (km/h)	3.5	3.2	3.6	4.3	3.8

For those of an Imperial persuasion:

UK (Imperial)	SW England	Wales	N England	Scotland	Overall
Total Distance (mi)	289.5	159.8	302.6	449.8	1201.7
Avg daily dist (mi)	11.6	13.3	12.6	14.1	12.9
Walking Days	25	12	24	32	93
Total Up (ft)	55505	36232	58775	88920	239432
Total Down (ft)	55757	36388	57826	89931	239902
Avg Up (ft/per day)	2220	3019	2449	2779	2575
Avg Down (ft/per day)	2230	3032	2409	2810	2580
Avg speed walking (mph)	2.8	2.6	2.8	3.0	2.9
Avg speed overall (mph)	2.2	2.0	2.3	2.7	2.3

The numbers show the relative difficulty of Offa’s Dyke, which is a much underestimated national trail. Although there are no great peaks, the grain of the land means that there are many ups and downs and the daily distances are extensive. In my case, I had my most severe physical problems on this stretch, but the advantage was that it toughened me up for the challenges in the Pennines and Scotland. I find it fascinating that I did more climbs and descents in Wales than in any other leg of the journey.

The numbers also show the vast area that is Scotland. For those Southerners who rarely get north of Watford, it is always interesting to learn just how large a proportion of Britain Scotland occupies. It seems unfair that the Scots have both the most beautiful scenery and the most land. A pity about the weather, though I was dead lucky!  See below!!

In terms of height, which for me was initially the most demanding, the figures show that my journey included the equivalent of climbing and descending Mount Everest 8 times, or Table Mountain in Cape Town 80 times, or almost once a day!

The figures show a gradual increase in fitness. After the early, easy times in the South West, there is the shock of Offa’s Dyke, but after that the daily distances and the speed of walking gradually increase. The figures also show that walking on roads is easier and faster than on the National Trails, though it may be less enjoyable!

It is also apparent that in Scotland, I needed far lest rest during my walking day, and although the midges turned out to be no problem at all despite my initial concerns, I became quite used to walking the whole daily distance without stopping. I found that stopping half-way merely increased my aches and pains, so the right answer was to press on and relax at my destination. (The recorded stopping times are slightly misleading: they include stopping for checking a map, reading a notice, changing my rain gear, having a pee, and all other temporary interruptions. The machine was unrelenting!)

For me, the other lesson from the statistics, coupled with my own experience, is that I didn’t actually get that much fitter along the way. I had expected that by the end, I would be finding it very much easier to cover the daily distances than at the beginning. The statistics do show an improvement, but less than I would have expected. And certainly, there was no decrease in the amount of effort required.  Probably a sign of age!

The Weather

Probably the single most significant indicator of enjoyment on a long-distance walk is the weather. I tried to convince myself that bad weather didn’t make a difference provided I was dry and warm, but sometimes I was drenched to the skin and it did make a difference!  As it turned out, I couldn’t have been luckier!  I chose the perfect year for my walk and the perfect timing within that year! April was the driest month on record and although the whole country went through a wet patch in May and June, by July Scotland was dry and all the rain was in the south!

The statistics don’t indicate much about regional weather patterns; they just show how lucky I was!

	SW England	Wales	N England	Scotland	Overall
Sunny days	18	4	9	12	43
Cloudy days	7	3	6	14	30
Rainy days	0	5	9	6	20
% sunny	72%	33%	38%	38%	46%
% cloudy	28%	25%	25%	44%	32%
% rainy	0%	42%	38%	19%	22%

(By the way, if you have been reading any of this blog and would like to stay in contact after it closes, please just email me at kevinslejog@gmail.com . Alternatively, if you are already receiving emails of the posts, just hit the reply button in your email. I would really like to hear from you.)

The new Keiss Castle

The old Keiss Castle!

Sedimentary rocks, sloping into the sea, just as I had been told by Jerry way back in March

A last thistle, to remind me of my time in the Scottish wilds

I saved this fowl’s life!  It was wandering on the A99. I was able to alert its grateful owner, Ann-Marie, who lived nearby. I earned a cup of coffee for my efforts!

My last moor, Warth Hill

Just as it says. A moment of deliverance

With Veronica at the John o’Groats signpost

I was surprised and absolutely delighted that my brother-in-law John had taken the trouble to join us at John o’Groats!  He had driven over from Cape Wrath where he and his family were spending their summer holiday and his arrival was a huge surprise!  His welcome included a tot of Lagavulin Malt Whiskey which seemed somehow appropriate to the occasion!

Duncansby Head, the north-east corner of Scotland

A view westwards from Duncansby Head

Veronica appreciating the view

Looking out to sea at our celebratory supper

The island of Stroma, north of the mainland

Houses along the north coast in the evening sunshine

Thank you, sincerely, for accompanying me on my journey……

LEJOG Day 92: Wick to Keiss: Epilogue Part 3

Weather: Cloudy with cold northerly

Distance covered today: 12.7km (7.9mi)

Last night’s B&B: Queen’s Hotel (£50)

Cumulative distance: 1919.4km (1192.7mi)/ % Complete: 99.1%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 92 (click!)

A Personal View

To conclude my journey, I promised a last introspection on what this has meant to me at a personal level.  The first thing I should say, and it is a disappointment in the context of my intentions, is that doing a long-distance walk is not the way to find time to think.  In my mind’s eye, I had anticipated that after the early excitements, as the days started to fuse into each other, I would be lost in introspection and that I would be able to think deeply about things.  

I can safely report that this never happened! This blog is proof!  Things were changing all the time! At the most basic safety level, I needed to keep my wits about me almost all the time, whether it was avoiding traffic on the A-roads, or avoiding bottomless bogs on the moors.  Then there was the ever-changing kaleidoscope of views, colours, flora, fauna and landscape that demanded attention at every turn. On top of that there was the practical business of making sure I was on the right route and sometimes of negotiating obstacles along the path.  I found myself interrupting myself almost all of the time. I couldn’t have been busier!  The time for introspection was therefore generally in my bedroom at night, by which time I was routinely too exhausted to think and there was the ever-present deadline of the blog to observe, not to mention the problems of gaining access to the network! 

So I may not have THUNK DEEP THOUGHTS, but no matter. It’s hard to know where to start, but I feel it would be appropriate first to reflect on the attitudes of all the people I met along the way.  Over the entire period of the journey, not once did I feel threatened or in danger. I did comment in Avonmouth on the disaffection of the unemployed youth and I worried a little in Crewe about whether things would be safe after dark, but in terms of my own experience, I met only politeness and consideration. I find it scarcely credible that one can walk in any country, admittedly mostly in rural areas, and find nothing but people on their very best behaviour! It suggests to me, despite the headlines, a country essentially at peace with itself. It reflects generations of cultural programming, but it contrasts so strongly with this land’s history, some of which I was interested to learn about, where through generations, people were at war with each other. I am convinced that those enmities were driven by the people at the top, not the common folk. They were just the cannon fodder to the ambitions of the powerful. People surely couldn’t have changed so much otherwise, could they? 

To be fair, I did have one bad moment. I was walking across an intersection in up-market Cheshire and a car came up behind me wanting to turn into the intersection, just where I was walking with my back to the turning vehicle!  The first I knew of it was a loud and prolonged blast on the hooter. I was really irritated and had the presence of mind to hold my ground, spin on my axis, observe that the hooter was a fancy Audi sports convertible with a couple of yummy mummies on board. I enquired innocently whether I knew them? “Out of the way!” came the response. I moved not an inch and cupped my ear, pretending that I couldn’t hear. There was a yelled response and again I feigned polite ignorance. By now the driver was livid with rage and she was changing colour as I watched, bewitched! Eventually, she gunned her engine, did an exaggerated semi-circle around me, and gave me two fingers as she disappeared into the distance, burning rubber.  I felt I had had the better of the exchange!  This was though the only example I can remember of bad manners at any time on my journey and I wonder if there is anywhere else on earth where that would have been the case. 

I suppose another abiding impression from my journey is the surprising emptiness of Britain. For more than 90 days, I have been wandering along the length and breadth of the country, and most of the time I was in an empty space. It is true that I designed my journey to avoid built-up areas, but even so, it is scarcely credible that so much of this crowded island consists of nothing but open country. Back home, the media are full of people objecting to the evisceration of “green belt” land and the horrors of airport expansion, and yet the countryside is actually, virtually empty. I was also conscious along the way of the intense sense of community felt by people and their reluctance to move elsewhere in pursuit of jobs. I was struck by the fact that though I have poured heaps of vitriol on the motorway network, it does serve its essential purpose of moving people in their own time and in great comfort from where they are to where they want to be in very short periods of time. I was also struck, controversially, by how little land it actually does occupy (though the sound travels further). It seems to me that people see the country in terms of their roadmaps, rather than a satellite view of the reality. On a roadmap, even an OS map, roads are necessarily huge multiples of their width in reality, giving the impression that the country is being strangled in roads, when the reality is that it isn’t and that these roads are the thoroughfare to community cohesion and economic growth, despite the problems of energy and pollution. This, no doubt unpopular, observation was a revelation for me! 

Another extraordinary experience was the fact that I was not alone!  I had anticipated that one of the problems of the journey would be loneliness. I haven’t been alone for a few months, ever! I wondered how this would affect me.  Well, I can’t answer that question!!  For a start, I met so many lovely people along the way, almost all of whom did not object to my interrogating them!  Somehow, I felt liberated to ask questions that in a social context at home, I would have thought were far too much of an intrusion, but when you are pushing yourself physically and when you are in a different place emotionally and spiritually, it seems natural to cross the normal borders that inhibit communication.  I found myself forging relationships that I hope will sustain well beyond this journey.  

And then there was this medium. This too has been a revelation! Apart from my nearest and dearest and current friends, I have reconnected with many old friends and found that we were still communicating in the same way as we did decades ago. In a very strange way, they have spoken to me as I was in my youth, and that has resonated especially because what I have been doing is so far outside of my current reality. It is not going too far to say that the effect has been rejuvenating and invigorating!  Certainly not lonely! 

Just as important have been those dear friends and relations who have joined me on my travels.  Walking is a wonderful way to communicate. I think it helps that you aren’t staring into the other’s eyes, and that you have the chance to break the conversation by looking at, and commenting on, the view. Whatever the reason, I think the experience binds one to another in a way that few other activities can. I found along the way that I met small groups of people where this was true for them too. Often walking had brought them together, and they found themselves walking repeatedly, year after year, because they found the walking experience brought them a special relationship.  I now understand that.  My only disappointment is that many of the friends who said that they would join me for individual legs found that in the event they couldn’t. More’s the pity. In most cases their busy lives just wouldn’t allow it. For those that did make it, I think we forged a special bond that will endure. 

There are of course very many people who do LEJOG. As I approach the end I become ever more aware of just how many cyclists do it, and although I haven’t seen many walkers, because we are after all walking in much the same direction at much the same pace, I know that they are out there!  In some ways though, I like to think I belong to a fairly small group. Many LEJOGers are experienced walkers, who will already have done one or more of the long-distance paths I have covered on this journey. I also know that many inexperienced would-be LEJOGers never make it, because they were insufficiently prepared for such an undertaking. In my case, I must have been on the edge of that group, but the great advantage for me was that I was sufficiently inexperienced to be positively blown away by the beauty of the landscape of Britain. I know that I have repeatedly gone way over the top in this blog; been almost emotionally overwhelmed by some of the things I’ve seen.  I will never forget that incredible walk along the plateau to High Cup above Dufton on the Pennines or that walk over Rannoch Moor in the changing weather in the West Highlands. My emotional response was elevated by the walking of it, alone in the elements, pushing myself as hard as I could, hour after hour. You just don’t feel those things if you drive there in a car. It was my naivety and inexperience that lent a boyish glow to my whole experience. When I started, I had no idea that I would react the way I did. 

Another truly amazing experience was the sense in which I walked into Britain’s past. My knowledge of the history of these islands is at best sketchy (it’s one of my firm intentions to put that right when I get home!), and with the help of countless information boards, statues, memorials, guidebooks and the web, I have learned much about the stormy history of these islands. From pre-historic dwellings to the Roman invasion, from Offa and his little understood dyke to the Reivers of the Scottish borders, from the turbulent Tudor times to the Highland Clearances, from the ruins of the Cornish tin smelters to the ruins of the industrial revolution, I learned at first hand things that probably most English kids learn at school.   But for me, often unexpectedly coming upon these things, such as the house where Mary Queen of Scots lived when she was in Jedburgh, and so many other “discoveries”, there was a sense of huge excitement and interest. It all seemed to make more sense in the physical dimension than just in the written word. Again, I fear it was my heightened emotional state that did it for me. But it undoubtedly added an extra and unexpected dimension to my journey. I also noted with great sadness that in every single one of the hundreds of villages through which I passed, there was a memorial to those who had died in the terrible wars of the 20^th Century.  At least my generation has been spared loss on that scale. 

And finally, at a deeper level, I’ve come to realise that for the first time in my life, I’ve done something that I really didn’t believe I was capable of. I wish I had learned this lesson when I was much younger. I suppose common sense and experience have prevented me from taking foolhardy risks throughout my life, but that has also meant that I have consistently erred on the side of caution, and that has affected my life and my achievements. I now realise that I, like everyone, was capable of so much more, if only I had taken the plunge. When I planned this journey, I knew that I was relatively inexperienced and planned accordingly, but I still didn’t think that I would have the stamina, the resilience and the guts to make a go of it.  I was also aware that if I failed, I would do so very publicly, especially as a result of this blog!  Yet I still went ahead and did it!  That was out of character and surprising to me. This is probably something Father Johnson and the Jesuits were trying to teach me all those years ago, but I was too wrapped up in myself to learn it. If there is any lesson at all that I would like to pass on to my daughters, it is this.  No doubt General Freyberg would approve… 

That said, I wouldn’t have made it without the consistent help and support from Veronica. She has been there all along, worrying about my safety, mailing maps and prescription medicines, insisting on a nightly call so that in its absence she could call out the entire national emergency service, following my journey in detail on Google Satellite View, worrying about obstacles ahead, helping me with B&B bookings and sorting out my business affairs at home. She has made a huge effort for this journey, but has had few of the pleasures. I am hugely in debt to her!  

I want to thank all those friends and relations who took the trouble to walk stages with me, especially John F, who came all the way from Crete to join me for three fascinating days. I am most grateful also to those people that I met along the way, with whom I hope to have a continuing relationship. I want as well to thank all those who contributed to this blog with their comments, both on the blog itself or privately in emails, tweets and texts. They have been a stimulus to me and very much made this whole exercise more of a conversation than a personal reverie. They have, at least until this particular post (!), kept me grounded and at the same time, inspired.  

(By the way, if you have been reading any of this blog and would like to stay in contact after it closes, please just email me at kevinslejog@gmail.com .  Alternatively, if you are already receiving emails of the posts, just hit the reply button in your email.  I would really like to hear from you.)

A view of the High Street in Wick

Still counting down!

The scenery today was a bleak and featureless as ever. Nothing except grey, scudding cloud and a morose sea in the distance

Through the misty atmosphere, a view of Ackergill Tower, a venue for expensive corporate getaways and upmarket weddings

Still counting down! Actually, JOG was in easy reach today, but I wanted to arrive there tomorrow feeling fresh to welcome Veronica

Looming through the mist, the ruins of Castle Sinclair Girnigoe near Noss Head lighthouse. The 4th Earl of Caithness imprisoned his son there, suspecting rebellion, and fed him salted beef with nothing to drink until he died insane from thirst. Nice man.

For Richard O and Phyllis, a last look at these Scottish lambs – now almost full-grown

The River of Wester, flowing out of the Loch of Wester under the Bridge of Wester all the way to the North Sea.

My village for the night, Keiss

And this is Keiss’s main road, with my hotel up on the left. You will note that I was very short of photographic material in today’s drab wilderness!

LEJOG Day 91: Dunbeath to Wick: Epilogue Part 2

Weather: Partly sunny with vicious northerly, trying to stop me!

Distance covered today: 32.8km (20.4mi)

Last night’s B&B: Inver Caravan Park (£27)

Cumulative distance: 1906.7km (1184.8mi)/ % Complete: 98.4%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 91 (click!)

Practical tips for a long-distance walk

Now for the practical side!  I suppose this is the advice I would give to anyone crazy enough to want to do a journey of this duration and scale. Though I did read quite a bit about it before I left, and took the advice of others on board, I also made numerous mistakes, as I’m sure anyone who has attempted such a trip will also admit. The trouble is that it is always very hard to understand the nuances of someone else’s advice, especially if one is something of a novice in the game, which I certainly was.  That of course is a central part of the problem. All the books say that one should not attempt such a walk unless one really is an experienced long-distance walker, but the effort involved in gaining that status may delay a decision to do something like LEJOG until it is too late.  Certainly, in my case, there were numerous excellent reasons for delaying the start, but I quickly came to the conclusion that there would always be good reasons for delay, which would have meant never starting. The inevitable conclusion: just do it!  

So, given a decision to take on an ultra-long distance walk, I would suggest the following: 

Personal preparation and equipment

·         As preparation, do at least two long distance routes to become accustomed to carrying a heavy pack and to wearing boots day after day for long stretches. It will give you a good idea of your capacity. I didn’t do enough. Your feet will take the greatest pounding and anything you can do to harden them will be worth it. There is lots of advice in the literature about ways to harden feet, using alcohol and other potions. It would be wise to follow it.

·         Double your budget!  Using cheap equipment is a false economy. You will suffer the consequences.

·         For any given budget, the order of priority is boots, backpack, jacket and then the rest of the equipment. Spend as much on boots as you can possibly afford, and then walk them in properly. My greatest mistake was thinking that a few weekend walks was sufficient walking-in for my second pair. It wasn’t. And for a really long-distance walk you probably will need two pairs.  Make sure they are Gore-Tex and fully waterproof. I met many walkers whose feet were in a terrible state because their boots leaked, and they weren’t even on anything like a LEJOG!

·         There is lots of advice on backpacks in the literature, but as long as the backpack has an independent frame (i.e. the actual pack is not in contact with your back), and it is one of the high-quality brands, it should be OK. Make sure though that it is the right size, both for the length of your back and in its holding capacity.  Make sure you use it enough to toughen your shoulders and to check that it doesn’t chafe.

·         Jacket choice is crucial and I didn’t get it right. There is a trade-off between waterproofing, weight and temperature. I bought a reasonably pricy Gore-Tex jacket, which wasn’t water-proof enough and was too warm for my needs. The result was that even when it didn’t leak, I was sopping with perspiration which may be worse than just getting wet!

·         Spend a little on proper walking clothes. I was stingy and used ordinary M&S clothing.  I discovered later that there are these days all sorts of special walk-wear, which is quick-drying, impermeable to insects, UV-proof, etc. The quick-drying bit would have helped me greatly.

·         Use a bladder for rehydration. It fits inside the back-pack with a tube to the front and means that water is always easily available. It was one of the simplest and most useful devices on my journey.

·         Once you have packed your backpack, unpack it and remove a third of the items you have packed!  I once read an article by a long-distance walker who shortened the lengths of his bootlaces and the straps on his backpack to cut down on the weight! I am not necessarily advocating going to those extremes, but everything you carry will feel as if it weighs ten times as much after 30km (20mi). I discovered early on that I couldn’t carry my home on my back. I had to be a different person on the road. This involved making difficult choices about what I really needed and what would be just a luxury. I’m still in two minds about this netbook!

·         Compeed (blister plasters) and walking poles: My daughters insisted and if it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have made it!

Journey Planning

·         Plan your trip in detail before you start. I decided that I would plan the first third in detail and then make the rest up as I went along. I had thought that as I didn’t know what my walking capacity would be when I got fit and strong, it would be inadvisable to plan too far ahead. But when I finally came to plan it, I didn’t have access to decent maps, because I couldn’t carry all of them all the way. I was therefore trying to plan on the basis of Google Maps which clearly aren’t designed for walkers. Hence my route was at times quite eccentric!

·         As it happened, this year hasn’t been a busy one from an accommodation perspective, but even so, many of the B&Bs I tried were fully booked on the nights I needed. I also found that at this stage only a select number have their own websites and there was generally a much bigger selection available in any given town or village. This will probably change quickly, but until then and although I didn’t use them, the very extensive network of Tourist Information Centres is probably the most comprehensive source of B&B information. If, like me, you are reluctant to book too far ahead, then plan your trip in detail and keep lists of B&Bs in all relevant places for later booking by phone.

·         I probably planned in too many rest-days. The advantage is that it gave me a chance to look around the local environment, but at the same time, it was often frustrating, especially where the rest day B&B was distant from anywhere to have a meal, a drink, or get to a shop. On the other hand, they did give me a chance to get washing done and to recharge my batteries. The evenings before each rest day were very relaxing and enjoyable and I did find that the rest days helped me recover from many of my minor aches and pains. On rest days, a decent B&B made a big difference. Though I didn’t do so specifically, it is worth spending more on those B&Bs. 

Electronics and mapping

·         Having some sort of device to connect to the net is now essential. I like the keyboard on this netbook, but perhaps its days are numbered. Even since I started planning this journey, the technology has changed, with all sorts of apps now available for tablet devices and smart phones, and new services such as Ordnance Survey’s “GetaMap” now available at an inexpensive rate. My reliance on 1:25,000 OS paper maps and guide books for the national trails now seems distinctly old-fashioned, though, with Veronica’s help in posting on the maps, it was very reliable and secure. Being lost on the Pennines with a faulty electronic device might have been quite dangerous. The jury is still out on this one!

·         It goes without saying that having a mobile phone (and probably a smartphone) is essential. I found though that the signal in many parts of the more rural country areas was very problematical, and often it was worst in the valleys where the villages are located. Somewhat to my surprise, the coverage in Scotland has been uniformly excellent.

·         Wifi access has been a revelation. I have managed to find a way to get onto the net in every location with only one exception so far, though admittedly I had to use mobile 3G connections in one or two places and had problems uploading big files such as photos.  I had my frustrations with some older folk who had lost their wifi codes, or who just refused to let me get at their routers, but that is hardly surprising. In one or two places, I had to be a little inventive to get connected, such as persuading neighbours to allow me to use their wifi.  I even found that I couldn’t hack into the Youth Hostel Association’s network, which sensibly has been secured against nerds such as me trying to gain access to the web on their system. I used services such as the BT-Fon network and BT Openzone to connect on occasion and through my O2 dongle, I gained access to The Cloud and other wifi networks. All this required a considerable degree of nerdy knowledge and enormous persistence. I probably spent more effort in this area than actually walking!  This whole subject area is developing so rapidly that it doesn’t make sense for me to go into it in any more detail here. Suffice it to say that the net is revolutionising the whole business of long-distance walking.  As elsewhere, it is changing everything and the change is just starting!

·         Equipment takes a bashing on such a long walk. My Garmin satnav machine is coming apart at the seams (literally: the glue that holds the rubber liners in place seems to be liquefying!) and it has developed the frustrating habit of switching itself off unpredictably. My clothes are wearing out and the outer layers losing their water-proofing. My camera has done well, but I managed to scratch the lens early in my travels, so that all of my photos are damaged. My walking poles are on their last legs!  Again, with all of this stuff, it pays to go for the highest quality so that it lasts the distance.

So much for the practical side. Tomorrow I will write about the more personal aspects of my journey and what it has meant to me.  Suffice it to say at the moment that unless I had had the moral support of Veronica and all my friends and relations, no amount of preparation, equipment and knowledge would have been sufficient to make it all possible, let alone enjoyable…..

By the way, if you have been reading any of this blog and would like to stay in contact after it closes, please just email me at kevinslejog@gmail.com .  If you are already receiving emails of the posts, just hit the reply button in your email.  I would really like to hear from you, even if it is only one word, so that I have some idea of how many people were interested!!

This house set the tone for the day. It was tidy, but somehow bland

I tried to get these beautiful little flowers in focus, but was defeated by the howling, frosty northerly wind!

The desolate beauty of the northern coastline as the sedimentary rocks collapse into the sea

Counting down!

This is an ordinary place. Dozens and dozens of small farms, eeking out a living in difficult conditions

A brief patch of beauty: an old bridge across a stream

This house seemed to typify its surroundings. Neat but empty

A meadow down to the sea

Acres of emptiness

A long straight road to nowhere (well, actually to John O’Groats!)

My only interested spectators, cattle by the thousand!  And they were so bored by their surroundings, they found me fascinating!

As did their brothers in the next field!!

LEJOG Day 90: Helmsdale to Dunbeath: Epilogue Part 1

Weather: Partly sunny with howling northerly, spitting sleet

Distance covered today: 25.2km (15.7mi)

Last night’s B&B: Customs House (£20)

Cumulative distance: 1873.9km (1164.4mi)/ % Complete: 96.7%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 90 (click!)

As my journey’s end approaches, I thought it might be appropriate to draw all the strands together and I want to be as practical and unemotional as possible. I also want to try and make sense of the whole thing. I probably do need more time to reflect on it all; to gain some perspective, but on the other hand, it may be as well to get it off my chest while I am still walking and while it is all still fresh in my mind.  I have decided to split my comments into three posts; the first will deal with the accommodation I have enjoyed, the second will deal specifically with practical matters for walking long distance, and the third will touch on the more personal side of things. The last day of my journey will undoubtedly be a busy time, not least because I will be meeting Veronica at John O’Groats. I doubt I will have much time for blogging, so it is my intention on that day to publish just a short post. I will anyway be done with all the introspection by then!  She wouldn’t have it any other way! 

So let me start with accommodation. You will appreciate that on any long distance walk, the walker is unlikely to spend more than about six or seven hours of any given day, actually walking. To do more would require extraordinary levels of fitness. Even allowing for a couple of hours in the pub, most of the rest of the time will be spent in a B&B or alternative accommodation. Accommodation also comprises the most expensive part of the experience.  It follows that selection of the right accommodation is really very important in terms of the enjoyment of the whole thing. 

In my case, I used B&Bs exclusively, which meant that I didn’t use YHA Youth Hostels.  I did look at a few of them and they are an option, especially for those on a tight budget. I found that age really isn’t a barrier, and, at a cost, one can even reserve private rooms. But at best they offer little in the way of comfort, and they weren’t right for me, so I really can’t comment. 

My experience shows that B&Bs come in a number of guises, roughly as follows:

·         The Home from Home:  The accommodation is completely removed from the owner’s accommodation, which is marked “private” and can even be locked. The guests reside in an hermetically sealed part of the establishment, and apart from greeting, the only contact is over breakfast.

·         The Guesthouse: This consists of many rooms often on multiple floors, often in a converted traditional townhouse. The rooms tend to be Spartan, the residents professional working people and the overworked owners are seen only in passing.

·         The Retirement Project: An elderly couple, whose kids have flown the nest, and who need a little money to help with expenses. They are extremely attentive and old-fashioned, and not everything works. There are lots of pictures of grand-children and even great-grand-children, and many proud pictures of degree ceremonies! In many cases, only a single old lady remains.

·         The Family:  These people, remarkably, invite the guests into their home. Their hospitality can even extend to sharing evening meals with their guests. This is by far the most intimate form of accommodation and asks the most of the providers. It is also the most interesting and enjoyable, though it has its own stresses, even for the guest, who is inevitably on best behaviour!

·         The Hotel: For reasons of economy, I excluded the luxury end of the market. Most of the relevant hotels only offer B&B, and they are cheap and cheerful, but the advantage is that they always have a pub, serve evening meals and their very impersonal nature can be relaxing. On the other hand the service and food quality can be poor!

There are of course many variations on these themes, sometimes combining them. I found that I enjoyed all of these categories, and contrary to my expectations, found good and bad examples among all of them. It really isn’t possible to generalise in terms of quality, and all I would say is that a lot depends on how much intimacy one wants with the providers. Inevitably the hotels and guesthouses are the most anonymous, whereas the “family” is the most intimate and therefore interesting.

At first, I thought en-suite was a luxury I couldn’t afford, but I now find that so many B&Bs have en-suite facilities that it is worth checking. Often, it costs a little more, though certainly not always. The industry has developed very neat, tiny showers and loos that can be retrofitted to rooms where there is just a little space available. TV is very widely available, and is especially useful for morning weather forecasts. Often, digital TV has been retrofitted to a conventional TV via a set-top box, and getting the thing to work can be tiresome! The full English/Scottish breakfast is universal and sadly, there is often no alternative healthy option. I was surprised to find a phenomenally high standard of cleanliness across the board, which I found quite amazing! Not a single B&B let itself down in this respect. 

I needed to have my clothes washed as I went along. In those towns where there wasn’t a laundrette (most of them: everyone has washing machines and driers these days!), I had to fall back on the long suffering B&B owner to do my washing for me. Not a single one refused. Sometimes I had to pay, mostly I didn’t and although I knew they didn’t really enjoy doing it, they hardly ever showed any resentment. They understood my need. 

I decided to rate all the B&Bs as I went along. I used the following criteria:  Attitude, Facilities, Attractiveness, Breakfast and Wifi Availability.  Attitude counted twice as much, and wifi half as much as the other criteria.  As cleanliness was universally so high, I haven’t used it as a criterion.  I have chosen to publish only the top twelve and the bottom five.  The places at the top end are so good that I would recommend deviating from a planned route to spend some time there, and the bottom five are so bad that I would avoid them at all costs!   These ratings did not take account of the cost; I have included the B&B rate I was charged for information, but these rates will depend on the sort of room booked (single, double, etc.) and the time of year. It is interesting though that cost was not a huge factor in my assessment of quality.   My final comment would be that of course these assessments are hugely subjective, and will have depended on how I was feeling, my experience over the previous few evenings, how deep I was into my journey and of course my hosts too may have been having a good or bad day.  Of course, I haven’t experienced the final B&Bs in my journey yet, so they are obviously not included. If their rating affects the tables, I will amend the tables retroactively. 

Best B&Bs

Little Pengelly Farm	Trenwheal	96%	£    40.00
Corrie Duff	Fort William	94%	£    32.00
Nichols Nymet House	North Tawton	92%	£    57.00
Sedgeford House	Whitchurch	92%	£    40.00
Pack Horse Inn	New Mills	88%	£    67.50
Beck Hall	Malham	86%	£    50.00
Hallcroft	Dufton	86%	£    36.00
Kirkfield	Invermoriston	86%	£    45.00
Bashfords Farmhouse	West Bagborough	84%	£    37.50
Mulsford Cottage	Malpas	84%	£    45.00
Allerton House	Jedburgh	84%	£    55.00
Dunbius guesthouse	Tain	84%	£    40.00

 Worst B&Bs

The Lamb Inn	Congleton	38%	£    30.00
Rosemoor	St Austell	36%	£    40.00
Rose Cottage	Inverarnan	36%	£    40.00
Cross Farm	Mankinholes	32%	£    30.00
Golden Lion Hotel	Horton-in-Ribblesdale	30%	£    40.00

Unsurprisingly, the better B&Bs tended not to be on the National Trails, with a few honourable exceptions (Corrie Duff, Beck Hall, Hallcroft and Kirkfield), whereas three of the five worst were on the National Trails. This is probably because B&Bs on the National Trails tend to have a captive clientele and they don’t have to try so hard.  It sometimes felt as if I was being “processed”! 

I thought quite hard about whether I would actually publish these lists on the open internet. I decided that the winners wouldn’t mind and I am completely convinced that the losers have so little interest in me, any other customers, the internet or for that matter, their own B&Bs that they are most unlikely ever to see this. More’s the pity….. 

Please forgive me, but I can’t resist one final anecdote, now that I am on the subject of accommodation! It’s another story from East Russia and just one of a kaleidoscope of memorable experiences. I can’t for the life of me remember the town where it happened, but I do remember that I was staying in an hotel that used to house visiting party big-shots in Soviet times.  There were far more security staff wandering all over the place than there were hotel staff, and I felt a little insecure wondering what they were guarding against. 

I was watching BBC World News on TV as I went to bed. I had to get out of bed to switch the room lights off, and fell asleep while watching the news. A couple of hours later, I woke to hear some strange human sounds and found that the room lights were on!  To my amazement there was a very explicit porn film on TV and the room was ablaze with light!  Thoroughly discombobulated, I switched off the TV and the lights and went back to sleep. A little while later, the same thing happened! I began to get anxious that I was being set up for some sort of sting operation! My cunning strategy was to leave the TV on and change the channel. The only other English speaking channel I could find was a South African sports channel, M-Net SuperSport!  I thought I was hallucinating!  What had happened to me that I was suddenly alternating between porn and South African sport!  It seemed somehow appropriate that I was in Eastern Siberia! 

Next morning, I turned up for breakfast at 07:00 as advertised on the restaurant door, only to find that the many security staff were making sure that I wasn’t allowed ingress.  Later I found out that all the signs were there for the benefit of staff, not customers. 7:00 am was when the workers arrived.  Customers would just have to wait until the staff was ready. I wanted to ask about the fiasco in my room, but somehow, what with the language barrier, words failed me! 

I never did find out what the TV thing was all about, though I suspect it had something to do with the tastes of visiting party members before Perestroika. I am happy to report that I found nothing of those attitudes in any of my B&Bs on this trip. Not even the option of a porn movie!! (Not, of course, Veronica, that I was looking for it!!!)

Counting down from Helmsdale

First I had to shin it up this headland……

past this pewter sea

Suddenly, the Highlands were again alive with colour….

With the sea always visible to my right

I have decided that the flower of my journey is the humble buttercup. It has accompanied me with its bright, buttery yellow, all the way from Land’s End, colouring field after field, never missing a day!

Still counting down, though I detoured to Badbea….

Badbea was one of the “Clearance Villages”, where the Highlanders were settled next to the coast to make their way in the new industries of fishing and weaving. The siting of this village was dangerous and inappropriate and it didn’t survive. The memorial commemorates various people who were born there, some of whom emigrated to places like New Zealand

Still lots of colour in the Highlands. Why is it that so many Highland flowers are purple?  And why is it that colours in nature never seem to clash?  Is it just that we have learned our colour sense from nature and the harmony is hard-wired into our brains?

The bridge across the river at Berriedale. It involved a mile-long descent to sea-level, followed by a mile-long climb out the other side. The cyclists felt it more than me

At last, some decent waves on the coast!

Looking down at Berriedale from above

Looking up the coast towards Dunbeath

The Highland colours are rich and beautiful

This is Rosemary, who I met over breakfast at the Beltane Festival in Peebles!  I was trudging along today, lost in thought, when suddenly this car screeched to a halt, did a rapid turn and there she was!  Apparently, she was returning from a brief visit to Orkney and had just been talking to her friend in the car about this nutter who was doing LEJOG, and suddenly there I was!  I can’t believe she recognised me! What a strange coincidence!!  We had a joyous reunion and went on our way!

Ant’s eye view of traffic on the A9. I was sitting down for a rest

Still counting down in Dunbeath!

That is Dunbeath Castle up on the hill overlooking the North Sea

LEJOG Day 89: Golspie to Helmsdale

Weather: Cloudy with fresh northerly and the threat of rain

Distance covered today: 29.4km (18.3mi)

Last night’s B&B: Blah Mhor (£30)

Cumulative distance: 1848.7km (1148.7mi)/ % Complete: 95.6%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 89 (click!)

Today proved to be quite demanding. I knew from the start that it was a long leg, but there was a stiff head-wind and my early efforts at avoiding the A9 by making use of a coastal path, while visually very satisfying, just added to the distance I had to cover. I had also anticipated that today’s leg would be reasonably flat as it was more or less all along the coast, but in fact the A9 kept going up and down to avoid coastal obstacles.

The fact that I am getting close to the end is also having a psychological effect. I’m feeling quite exhausted and I can’t find a single part of my body that isn’t hurting!  This is probably mostly imaginary, and the aches and pains will disappear as soon as John O’Groats comes into view, but I am concerned that the next couple of days will be more difficult than I had anticipated.  One good thing is that the A9 is already a little less busy than it was, so staying alive is getting progressively easier!

Last evening in Golspie, while talking to Veronica on the phone, I couldn’t help noticing the huge statue on a hill above the village, apparently the largest statue of a man in the UK. It turns out that this is a statue of Lord Sutherland, the man responsible for the Highland Clearances in this part of Scotland. A charitable view says that he moved people to the coast because he realised they couldn’t make a living in their tiny farms in the Highlands and they would be better off in the more productive farmland at the coast. The commonly held view though is that he simply wanted their land for his own huge sheep farms and for hunting, and the people were in the way.  In which case, I find it completely amazing that the statue wasn’t torn down years ago!  Thinking of the attitudes of minorities in power and their high-handed approach to ordinary people immediately led me to think yet again of my South African experience, and in particular, of a harrowing set of events that took place in the late 1980s, a few years before the momentous changes in that country.
 
I had been tasked to manage a “re-refinery” which cleaned and refined used lubricants, and produced some very innovative and sophisticated products based on the re-refined base oil. My company had bought the business from an entrepreneur who had found an effective niche in the market and was competing successfully with much larger competitors such as ourselves.

By any standards, the situation was extraordinary. The entrepreneur, in typical fashion, had lived in a small house right inside the factory walls.  The business was located in Boksburg near Johannesburg in South Africa. As the business prospered, so the entrepreneur had embellished his residence with some of the trappings of conspicuous wealth, such as external guest suites, gold-plated taps, vast multi-rosed showers, a swimming pool the size of a small lake; all within the huge security walls that guarded the factory, as if inside some mediaeval castle.  This was where Veronica and I were to live with our two very small daughters, right in the middle of an industrial suburb that surrounded the factory.
 
It was a time of seething unrest in South Africa, and conservative places like Boksburg were at the epicentre of the struggle.  The black workers in the factory were under great pressure both from their unions and from the liberation movements to withdraw their labour, because the widespread belief was that the apartheid regime would fall under sustained economic pressure.

Of course, I was trying to make a profit. My problem was that at the time, the price of oil was steadily declining after the heady price-rises of the seventies and early eighties. This meant that our competitive advantage, the comparatively low cost of our re-refined oil, was being eroded and the profitability of the business was on a knife edge. It had reached the point where it would have been just as cheap for us to use crude oil derived base oil to make our products, rather than the re-refined oil that we produced in the factory.  I was though all too aware that the majority of the workforce, more than 200 workers, was employed in the re-refinery, and most of their jobs were therefore in jeopardy.  I was convinced that the price of oil would soon start rising again, and that if only we could tough it out, we were in a future-proof business. We also had vital skills that would have been permanently lost if we had closed the plant.  However, the shareholder was demanding an early and reasonable return on investment.

The unions were very much aware of the situation and were constantly trying to persuade the workers to go on strike to increase pressure on the company.  Meeting after meeting was held with worker’s representatives explaining that a strike would be the last straw. The pressure on me to close the re-refinery would be overwhelming. A strike would be industrial suicide for the staff.

I was away on holiday when I got the news that a strike had been declared.  I rushed back and we managed to persuade the workers to think again, but the pressure on them from the unions steadily increased.  In the end, the issue was clearly political and not a matter of industrial relations. The shareholder couldn’t understand my attitude. If anything, they felt that a strike would present an excuse to close the re-refinery without consequence. Why not use it?  I found myself in a most unusual situation where a small committee of workers representatives and my own small management team were completely in agreement about the right way forward. But all the external pressure, whether from the unions or the shareholders, was to do the thing that would cause the most pain for the workers themselves and which would destroy forever a “green” business that was conserving resources.

Ultimately, the pressure became too great and all the workers agreed formally to go on strike. I could no longer resist without resigning. I took the decision to close the re-refinery and informed the workers of my decision that as they went on strike, so their employment would end. Even then, we hoped they would come to their senses when they realised that there would be no pay-out, no social security, nothing; just unemployment and extreme poverty for themselves, their families and all their extended families. We decided to use office staff to keep the blending plant operating where the final products were manufactured, to keep supplying our customers while hoping against hope that sanity would return.

Veronica took charge of the blending plant. I was amused to see her start ordering the office staff around as if they were all married to her. In no time at all, as is so often the case in these extreme situations, a skeleton staff of less than a tenth of the usual crew were meeting the normal daily production targets and our customers were kept supplied. It became clear that we would soon run out of base oil and we steadily moved into using new crude oil-derived base oil instead. The fate of the re-refinery was sealed.  We wanted to make a statement that it was business as usual, especially to prevent our customers from leaving in droves.  I had made the decision that we would not move out of our home and despite the high security walls, we were extremely vulnerable. My judgement was that moving the family would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness. We would stay. To this day, I regret playing industrial politics with the safety of my family. In the end it worked out, but in retrospect it was not an acceptable decision.

The day the workers returned to receive their final wages, I insisted, against the advice of my management team, on going to the main entrance of the factory to say farewell to each of the workers as they left. Passions were aroused and the situation was potentially extremely violent. I didn’t know what to expect.  In the event, I offered my hand and every one of the dismissed workers shook it. I was highly emotional through the entire period. Right at the end, the dismissed re-refinery foreman came up to me, shook my hand in the African style and told me that the problem was bigger than all of us and that I should not hold myself responsible.  He was out of a job. I doubt he ever again got a job with anything like that level of responsibility. And yet he was big enough to be magnanimous to me at the point of his own personal despair.

In retrospect, it is hard to judge the rights and wrongs of that situation.  It is certainly true that economic pressure was the key factor in the peaceful change to democracy in South Africa.  The people who paid the price were the workers who lost their jobs as a result of that pressure. The winners were all those people who benefitted from the peaceful transition. In most cases they were not the same people.

I think that in these situations, everything is clear for the people on the extremes. For the people in the middle, the people in ordinary jobs doing everyday things, the situation is much less clear. The points of principle are confused and contradictory. The right course of action can be very difficult to determine. I often think of that when I hear news of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Egypt.
 
Thank goodness I am no longer in those situations….

The statue of Lord Sutherland on the hill behind Golspie

A Westie in a window, objecting to my presence!

My alternative to the A9; this glorious grass path next to the sea

Dunrobin Castle from the sea-front

This lady was painting it in watercolours, rather skillfully

A bay on the coastal walk

The grass path continued along the coast…

And through these woods….

But only too soon, I was back on the dreaded A9

Ruins of the broch, Carn Liath, a well preserved prehistoric building, between 1,900 and 2,300 years old

A rather pleasant beach along the coast between Golspie and Helmsdale

Counting down the miles!

A bay near Helmsdale

The fishing village of Helmsdale. My B&B is among the houses on the left

I could just see oil production platforms and rigs on the horizon out in the North Sea

LEJOG Day 88: Tain to Golspie

Weather: Cloudy and still

Distance covered today: 25.9km (16.1mi)

Last night’s B&B:Dunbius Guesthouse (£40)

Cumulative distance: 1819.3km (1130.5mi)/ % Complete: 94.1%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 88 (click!)

It was as I thought it would be; initially the margins on A9 were quite reasonable, but progressively, sneakily, they narrowed until they became non-existent.  I have read many reports of the trials and tribulations of cyclists and walkers on the A9 and I wasn’t looking forward to it.  I did have in my armoury though the experience of the homicidal maniacs of Devon to fall back on. There I had devised survival strategies which proved useful today and although I was irritated by it, I didn’t actually feel threatened.

The irritation is many-fold. For a start all the sounds of the country-side are drowned out by the savage roar of the traffic, which at times can be quite deafening. Secondly, for some reason the flora along the margins of the roads is much less varied than beside the minor roads. Julian has suggested that this may be because the insect population has been decimated by the traffic so that pollination can’t take place, or perhaps the wind from vehicles interferes with seed distribution. Maybe maintenance of the verges interferes with the natural cycles of the plants, or maybe exhaust fumes poison the plants. Perhaps all of these effects contribute, but there are undeniably fewer flowers next to the busiest roads. 

A more pernicious irritation is simply scale. On minor roads and paths, things change at a human dimension. After a remarkably brief interval, things are different; there are new objects to observe, new smells and sounds. The sensory environment changes kaleidoscopically. But on a major A-road, the engineers have designed the environment with a view to stasis. Things should not change faster than the reaction time of a driver moving at 60mph (100km/h). The curvature of the road, the size of signposts, the positioning of intersections; all of these things are designed so that to a walker, it appears as if the whole world is moving in slow-motion and it can become, frankly, quite boring.

I had read before setting out on my journey that many of my nutter colleagues had been frustrated by the A9. They had found the experience so exasperating that they were longing to reach John O’Groats just to end their frustration. I decided to guard against that for fear that I would find myself wanting the whole thing to be over while at the same time dreading its end! I tried to put my strategy into action today!  The idea would be to ignore the road, ignore even the mileposts inexorably counting down the distance to JOG, and use the time to THINK!  This was easier in theory than practice. I found myself leaping about like a cartoon roadrunner, trying to avoid the huge pantechnicons, articulated lumber carriers and tourist buses, whose beam fitted neatly over their half of the road. My landlord this morning compounded my misery by arguing that my assumption that distance would stem the flow was faulty. He asserted that many of these vehicles were bound for or coming from Orkney via the ferry at Wick, and so there would be no stemming of the metal tide until beyond Wick!

It was perhaps inevitable therefore that as I was staring death directly in the face every few paces, my thoughts should have turned to other life-threatening experiences in my past. One in particular stands out.   I can’t exactly remember how I got there, but it was during my year in the US as an exchange student, and I was visiting a family in Ohio. The father was an Undertaker and he offered to show me his handiwork as he was particularly happy with his latest customer.

Indeed, the coffin was ornate to the point of kitsch, but more disturbingly, the poor, dead, very much made-up, old lady in it was open to the viewer. I hadn’t seen a dead body before, so this was a shock to me, and I remember being struck by how composed and happy she looked lying there in her coffin. In that part of the world, apparently, all funerals were conducted with open coffins that were closed only after the funeral service.

That evening, a group of foreign students and I were taken by the Undertaker to his holiday cottage on a lake in the vicinity (undertaking being a profitable business in Ohio), and the Undertaker’s daughter suggested we go for a paddle in a canoe on the lake to watch the sunset. So off we set, all five of us, paddling along out towards the middle of this substantial lake. I was obviously a little disturbed at the events of the afternoon, and I remember starting a conversation on the whole subject of death.
 
It transpired that we were a religiously diverse lot. There was a Buddhist from Thailand, a Hindu from India, a Muslim from somewhere in the Middle East, a Baptist from the US (the Undertaker’s daughter), and myself, still calling myself a Catholic at that stage, but struggling with my convictions. The discussion inevitably turned from death to religion. As is so often the way in those sorts of conversations, we were celebrating our commonalities rather than our differences, as we explored the things that our religions seemed to have in common.  In time we seemed to be saying that there was more that connected us than separated us.

As the sun went down, the weather started to change. In hot summers on the endless plains of the mid-west, storms can and do spring up very suddenly.  At first we weren’t concerned, thinking the storm would soon blow over, but a vicious wind was now violently whipping the once placid surface of the lake into a cauldron of waves and spray. In those relatively shallow lakes, the effect of strong wind is dramatically to increase the height and steepness of the waves. By now we had almost no visibility, made worse as evening darkness suddenly descended.  We didn’t have a compass and although we were trying to paddle into the wind, we had no idea whether we were moving towards the shore or towards the centre of the lake.  The height of the waves increased to the point where we began to ship water. We tried desperately to bale the water out of the canoe, using shoes and paddles, but it was clear that we were fighting a losing battle. We were going down….

As the canoe started to sink, we decided to abandon ship!  We had a couple of flotation devices on board but not enough for all of us. The idea was that we should stay very close together holding on to each flotation device and hoping that collectively, they would have the buoyancy to support all of us. Just before the canoe sank, I decided to get into the water to provide a focus towards which the others could move. I put my legs over the side, and found myself standing up in waste-high water!  Within a few minutes, we had made it to the shore, and what’s more we could now just see lights through the trees. A very bedraggled and demoralised group of survivors was welcomed into a house, and while we dried off, telephone calls were made to our host for the night, who was understandably half-demented with worry!

The conversation which followed was very interesting. It seems that everyone on board, having just recently been celebrating the things that brought us together, had in that time of extreme distress, reverted to the essence of their own religion, praying for deliverance to the deity of their choice.  We had all been so arrogantly confident out there on the placid lake. An experience of real terror had reduced us to our essence in a very short period of time. I learned that evening that emotion triumphs over logic for all but the very strongest in a moment of panic, and I now think that this is a natural, instinctive reaction to extreme peril. It is the triumph of the instincts that natural selection bestowed on all of our ancestors over many millions of years, fighting against and vanquishing the power of logic that is by comparison an almost instantaneously recent human development.

The juggernauts of the A9 might well be dangerous and they may well irritate me, but they are as nothing compared to the undiluted terror of that far-off evening!

The A9 out of Tain: wide margins, no problem…

Except the pesky mileposts reminding me that I have some distance to go along this infernal road!

But then, a grass meadow down to the Dornoch Firth. What a pleasure!

The bridge over the Dornoch Firth: at 890m, one of the longest in Europe to be built by the cast-push method. So now you know!

Looking up towards the Highlands along the Dornoch Firth

Presumably these mileposts will torment me all along the way!

Self-portrait of the blogger drinking tea at a service station

This is the lace flower!

And this is its source!  Surely no more than Cow Parsley! I apologise for all the confusion!

And here is a lovely leaf! A clue for the experts. The thong is from my camera!

A gorgeous farmhouse below Cnoc Odhar and Creag an Amalaidh (how on Earth does one pronounce them!)

By now the A9 was narrow and marginless, but there was no change to the traffic density!

This hill was usefully called The Mound

No room for error!

I think I’ve captured this before, but it is exquisite!

The Mound from up front and personal

Getting there!

Drummuie Council Buildings.  Really!!!???

Footpath lighting!!!  Though I must admit that it will be dark up here in winter!

LEJOG Day 87: Alness to Tain

Weather: Cloudy and cool with cold northerly

Distance covered today: 20.8km (12.9mi)

Last night’s B&B: Commercial Hotel (£40)

Cumulative distance: 1793.4km (1114.4mi)/ % Complete: 92.7%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 87 (click!)

For the last three days, despite my references to the dreaded A9, I have in fact managed to avoid it almost completely with the exception of the crossings of the Moray and Cromarty Firths, where there was no alternative. Today, I was able to use a minor road that actually described a straighter route from Alness to Tain than the A9 would have, and I managed to avoid the A9 altogether.  My good fortune is though, about to run out!  From now on, I fear the A9 will be my constant antagonist.  With any luck, the traffic will start to reduce as I get further north, on the reasonable assumption that there are fewer and fewer places for the road to get to until eventually, it just runs out of land!

The minor road took me through agricultural country, with the emphasis on cattle and sheep farming, but with some arable activity as well.  Most of the farms looked relatively small, and as I felt the edge of the cold northerly, I could only wonder what it must be like farming at these latitudes in the grip of an icy winter. There would be very few hours of daylight, lots of rain and snow and bitterly cold winds to contend with. I imagine only the very tough and determined can succeed here. Amongst the farms, there were though, a number of almost palatial residences tucked away from the A9 and almost out of sight except to me on my minor road. Presumably, these places are still within commuting distance of Inverness, which would explain the wealth. I saw a number of equine properties and even came upon a cross-country course with some rather tasty fences at a place called Scotsburn. I discovered that this was in fact a British Eventing Course, and it must be one of the most northerly eventing properties in the UK.
 
At one point, I saw in the distance almost behind me a huge cruise liner, moored in the Cromarty Firth, seemingly amongst the oil rigs and drilling equipment. It couldn’t have been more incongruous!  I spoke about it to a fellow who was battling with ivy that had overwhelmed his boundary wall.  He told me that two or three of these enormous cruise ships visit the Cromarty Firth every week. The passengers disembark onto buses which ferry them down to Inverness and back. We speculated that it must be considerably cheaper to moor these huge ships in the Cromarty Firth, rather than docking them in Inverness. With great respect to Cromarty, but there are better views! Perhaps the average cruise ship passenger’s eyesight isn’t so good anymore….

As I walked northwards rather briskly in the cold northerly breeze on the straight, flat and rather featureless road, I found myself with more time to think than has been the case for some time.  It struck me that I have said very little in this blog about my cancer.  The reason for that is partly because I have nothing original to say about it, and mostly because I wanted to avoid harping on about my health which would be of no interest to anyone except me.  It is though significant that my health did not inhibit my LEJOG attempt at all.
 
Certainly, when my condition was first diagnosed in 2003, I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would one day be able to attempt LEJOG. In common with many of my fellow males, I had had only the faintest idea about prostate cancer, but I was in some unfocused sort of way, more scared of it than of other cancers.  I suppose the reason is because it affects an intimate, vital and multi-functional part of the anatomy, in a region which most males are in any case uncomfortable talking about and since things in the area are very sensitive, the thought of ill-health and painful intervention there is even more unwelcome.  I let myself and my family down badly by not having the appropriate check-ups in time.  By the time it was diagnosed, it was already too late for a number of the conventional treatments such as a prostatectomy (surgical removal of the prostate), or brachytherapy (treatment through the use of radioactive pellets injected into the prostate). I had as a result to undergo a more severe regime of radiotherapy and hormone treatment, with more short-term health effects and a poorer long-term prognosis.

The day the positive confirmation of the cancer came through, I was working in The Hague.  I remember that terrible conversation with Veronica in which I told her that our fears were real.  I didn’t have a car in The Hague, preferring the very Dutch business of relying exclusively on a bicycle for transport.  I remember deciding not to go back to work from the hospital and instead cycling down to the beach at Scheveningen near The Hague, and sitting in the dunes, feeling shocked and depressed, but also feeling very cross with myself for feeling those things.  I have talked earlier in this blog about my attitude to death, and now, confronted with its imminence, I wasn’t exactly behaving rationally in accordance with my views on these things.  Be that as it may, I do remember a great feeling of numbness; a separation of myself from the rest of the world, lost in my own thoughts and feelings and almost oblivious of my surroundings.

The medical fraternity in The Netherlands had great equipment and joined up computers, but they were a little ordinary in terms of bedside manner.  They had told me bluntly that with my stage of cancer, the five-year survival chances were limited. I decided anyway that I was going home: the business of commuting weekly to The Hague wasn’t going to work while I was undergoing treatment. I simply informed my boss that I was going back to England, fully expecting that this would result in an early termination on medical grounds.  I was surprised and delighted when he told me that he would have done the same. He told me to design myself a job that I could do from home within the constraints of the treatment and that there would be no change to the terms and conditions of my employment, including my remuneration package and retirement benefits, etc.  I could hardly believe my ears!  I very much doubt that there are many companies in the world that would have done that, and I do doubt that even my company would do it again if confronted with the same situation in present circumstances.

In England, I found the medical fraternity the polar opposite of that in The Hague.  Joined up computers?  I found that the only way to share information between surgeries, hospitals and consultants was to get hold of the information myself and bring it with me in a big file.  I remember my first MRI Scan. It took place in a big trailer next to a prefab shed!  But I will never fault their bedside manner. I can’t comment professionally on their recommendations; I don’t have enough knowledge, but I found the nature of their attitudes to me to be uniformly excellent. They never minimised the seriousness of the condition, but they seemed convinced that together we would address the cancer logically, that we would try appropriate interventions and that there would always be alternative approaches to be tried. Gradually I became convinced that they believed their rhetoric that “most men die with prostate cancer, rather than of it”. We will see.

In some ways, this journey has symbolised a return to “normal” health for me. When the cancer was diagnosed, I doubted that I would ever lead a normal life again.  This walk has shown me that I have made the appropriate and necessary adjustments, and whatever the future holds, this is a new lease on life.

Believe it or not, that is a bigger achievement for me than walking a thousand miles.

The High Street in Alness. During the few hours I was there, this street sweeping machine swept the street 5 times!!  Either the Scots throw a lot away on their streets, or there is spare capacity in the civil service!

This lugubrious lady seemed to be asking, “What on Earth are you doing??”

Beautiful, but ??

Nature in colourful harmony!

Opulence revisited

Old opulence!

?

 

An enormous cruise-ship in Cromarty Firth

A terrible picture, but these were some very difficult cross-country jumps!

A clue!  It turned out that this is the British Eventing Scotsburn Eventing course

And still my constant companions, the posties are here in exactly the same little vans, just dirtier!

Typical countryside: the farming is small scale and not very intensive

Typical of my walk today. Long straight minor roads without much of interest

My destination: the atmospheric little village of Tain

A hotel which used to be a castle. My B&B is more humble. It is called Dunbius. This is apparently not a strange Gaelic name. The house was built by the owners. Hence “done by us”! Geddit!!

LEJOG Day 86: Culbokie to Alness

Weather: Cloudy and cool with fresh northerly

Distance covered today: 14.7km (9.1mi)

Last night’s B&B: Netherton Farm (£30)

Cumulative distance: 1772.6km (1101.4mi)/ % Complete: 91.6%

GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day 86 (click!)

After yet another piece of eccentric planning, I discovered that in practice today’s leg was a mere 15km (9mi).  I remember very clearly the sensation at the beginning of this journey, especially when I was training for it, that such a distance would have seemed quite challenging, whereas now it is like having a half-day!  Good thing too, because when I arrived at tonight’s B&B, I was confronted by a very surprised land-lady who told me I didn’t have a booking!  I have no doubt at all that I did, but whatever the facts, she had already let the room, so there was no point in arguing.  In any case, it looked a rather down-beat sort of place, and I wasn’t too disappointed to try elsewhere, only to find that all the other B&Bs in town were fully booked. As usual in these circumstances, I turned to the only person I know who remains completely steady in a crisis, Veronica, and asked for help. She quickly found an alternative in a nearby town, while I tried the very last option, the colourfully named Commercial Hotel, and hey presto, they had just had a cancellation and they had one last room. Having thoroughly disturbed her day, I managed to sort myself out after all!

It is interesting though that this part of Scotland is so full of tourists at present. All the guests in my B&B last night were from the continent. I was the only English speaker at breakfast and the conversation was entirely in German, between a family from Austria and one from Switzerland. The dreaded A9 was today absolutely teeming with traffic. The towns and villages I passed through looked prosperous and clean.  On Scottish BBC TV this morning, I heard a report that the economy up here out-grew the UK economy substantially over the past decade, and as I have been reporting throughout this journey, there is every evidence that this is true. The report commented that the growth in exports of expensive malt whiskey has had something to do with economic growth in the Highlands, and certainly in many of the local pubs and hotels, the malt whiskey business is booming. Whiskey tastings are apparently popular among tourists, in the manner of wine-tastings elsewhere. I haven’t yet succumbed myself, for obvious reasons!

It is also clear that this part of the country is still benefiting from North Sea oil. I noticed a sizable collection of rigs out in the Firth of Cromarty, and a few of the B&B owners told me that when the drilling rigs are around, the local establishments are really busy.  There is also a different, frontier feel to the place. Although the décor is vulgar in the Commercial Hotel, the feel of the place reflects its name.  This is where travelling workers relax. I overheard a conversation amongst a couple of barmaids complaining that the fellows who propositioned them last night were unattractive and clumsy. It wasn’t the propositioning they were complaining about; it was the style!  This is a very different place from the National Trails, where such a conversation would have been outrageously shocking for us genteel walkers! As I write this, I am looking at a few guys at the bar. They have their company names emblazoned on the backs of their tee-shirts.  They might as well be packing six-guns!

In the B&B at breakfast, while I was trying hard to understand the German spoken by the Austrian guests, and not really succeeding, I was thinking about my own state of emotion as this journey draws inexorably to its conclusion.  Last night, with my hostess’s friends, I had listened to their immense pessimism about the European financial situation and about how we are all going to enter another major depression. These experiences reminded me of a journey to Austria that I had made on business about a decade ago.
 

At the time I was captivated by the beauty of Vienna and considered that it would be a privilege to live there.  At dinner that evening, I was really surprised by the attitudes I found. As the visitor at this gathering of company staff, I was being ushered from table to table, and I found the mood to be generally really down-beat. On enquiry, I was told that the whole of Austria was quite depressed at the time. The reason was that Hungary was soon to join the EU. The Austrians said they were really concerned about this. Over the border, there were hundreds of thousands of unemployed people who would flood into Austria and work for a pittance, taking jobs from Austrians and affecting wage rates and labour markets. Austria’s high living standards would be decimated and it would pay a huge price for the European dream.

The following day, I travelled to Hungary and had a similar dinner in Budapest that evening. To my immense surprise, there was a similar mood of depression in the room.  On enquiry I was told that people were now quite depressed about the imminence of their joining of the European Community.  I was told that they feared that the Austrians in particular would see Hungary as an obvious takeover target.  The Hungarians had finally escaped the Soviet yoke, but now the Austrians, in a capitalist guise, would come in and buy up all the simple, emerging Hungarian companies, using capital and skill to dominate the Hungarian economy and introduce a new era of economic penury for the masses of unskilled Hungarian workers. International companies would see Hungary as a market for their sophisticated products and unemployment would rocket.

In my view, both sides had a point. What they feared is actually what happened in Germany when the wall came down.  What all these people didn’t understand though was that the removal of the barrier to the free movement of workers and goods would be the single biggest boost to their mutual economies in hundreds of years. There would of course be losers, but the vast majority would profit hugely from the change. Yet these concerns are reflected across the borders of any number of countries across the world, even today.

It seems to me that this is just another example of the twin great fears that instinctively motivate human beings: fear of the future and fear of the other, in this case, unknown people just across the border.  As I have argued earlier in this blog, those instinctive reactions are probably the reason our primitive ancestors were so successful at surviving as physical underdogs in a viciously dangerous and competitive world. In a world in which we now dominate, those instinctive reactions are probably responsible for more harm than any other human attribute. It is amazing that the power of logic and rational thought simply can’t compete.

Last night’s evocative B&B, Netherton Farm in the dying sunlight

The view over the Cromarty Firth in the evening sunset

An important moment! John O’Groats appears on a mileage board for the first time. I slightly readjusted my percentage completion statistics to reflect this information

A rather noisy reception committee for me on the Cromarty Firth. They seemed to think fence posts offered a better view

An exquisite tern suggesting I go elsewhere

?

Another shot of the fireweed!! Exquisite!

No lace is as intricate

A row of neat cottages in the village of Evanton

High summer and the berries are appearing

And the mushrooms

I managed to escape the A9 on this cycle track amid the Fireweed

The spirit of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Rebellion lives on!

All purple, yellow, brown and green

My cycle track took me through plenty of woods

Oil drilling rigs on the horizon near Alness and Invergordon