Saturday
I have to front up here. Terry and I are not obvious out door types. We are 60 odd years old and markedly overweight. We do not carry our possessions in a rucksack and bivouac in the woods. We cover 8 to 15 miles of steep climbs and equally steep descents each day, but we do it slowly with lots of stops to ‘admire the view’. Our luggage is carried from hotel to hotel by taxi and we eat in good restaurants. Saturday was our first serious walk. We went through spectacular limestone scenery and picturesque hill villages, ending with a really impressive hill fort. Eventually, another good meal. Unfortunately I fell over.
Early on, I had mentioned to Terry that my default plan, should the climbing prove too strenuous, was to throw myself to the ground feigning semi-consciousness, muttering “helicopter”. Instead, walking down an ordinary residential road on the way to the restaurant, stone-cold sober, I looked up to identify an exotic Mediterranean bird (it was a seagull) and fell off the curb. I lurched back across the pavement, grazed my shoulder on the wall and fell heavily on my right knee. I lay on my back and tried to make it look as if the whole manoeuvre was intentional or in some way ironic. A passing French motorist, aged about 25 years, stopped to help. I sat up with ripped, blood soaked trousers and affected sang-froid. ‘I’m ok. I fell over’. He looked puzzled, the latter being obvious, the former less so. He asked me if I was sure and reluctantly drove on.
We went back and I cleaned up whilst Terry expressed regret at failing to photograph it all. Then we attempted another walk to the restaurant, more carefully this time.
Over dinner I wondered whether we should join the Labour Party, as they now had a leader with ideas broadly similar to our own. Terry casually dropped that she already had, in order to vote for Corbyn. I do not know why she does this, dropping stuff in to the conversation that she has kept secret for no reason. It has been a fixed pattern over all four decades of our relationship. “No, I’m not going to work next week. Actually, I’m expecting to have a baby on Thursday”. The revelation over dinner, however, was a rare Junior Walker and the All-Stars moment. This refers to the occasion in 1975 when she told me that she had to stay in Top Shop to listen to ‘Roadrunner’ right to the end. I knew then that I had to share my life with her. Same thing.
Sunday
Saturday night was not yet dead. The expected thunderstorm arrived at 2 am (Terry slept through it) and at one point the power went off. Shortly after, the mini bar juddered back to life. Then my insides started gurgling. There was something amiss with my lower gastrointestinal tract, possibly due to my failure to heed warnings about the potential lethality of Steak Tartare. By morning I was uncertain that walking was a good idea, but we set off anyway, with loperamide and clean underwear in the backpack.
We had a short but hard journey over a series of steep sided ridges. The rain had made the air fresh, but as the sun rose, it got really hot. We walked slowly, impeded by an accumulation of ailments. Terry has a problem with her right knee, probably osteoarthritis. It gives her problems when going downhill. I had been calling her Leggy Mountbatten, but we now had matching gaits, owing to my lacerated knee.
The walking guide supplied by the tour company was very well written, but it failed to mention that much of this walk was through a hunting reserve. Being a Sunday, the hunters were out in force, complete with Day-Glo vests, dogs, horns and guns. There were several signs that appeared to translate as ‘Careful, avoid balls’, good but impractical advice. We survived. I do not think I was very well, because I slept for two hours before dinner, and then could only manage about a quarter of the meal (much to the distress of the bistro owner, who had to be told ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ several times). We walked back up the hill with an enormous thunderstorm flashing dramatically but silently in the distance.