London 2012 - Synchronized Swimming, Archery, Dressage and Darts

Don't get me wrong. I love synchronized swimming. Or Dancing Under Adverse Weather Conditions as it's called in our house. It has to be the funniest of all the Olympic events. And the participants all seem to have mastered that comedic strategy so perfectly exemplified by Margaret Dumont, the fat lady in all the Marx Brothers movies. Sometimes it's funnier when you play it straight.

I love all the comedy events.

I mean, I love Dressage.

That's the one where they get horses to do all those cute tricks that only dogs normally do. Like walking backwards, rolling over, sit up and beg. Like that.

I also love that fact that there is a sport so expensive to take part in that it's dominated by oil sheiks and the British Royal Family.

And the endurance walking is, of course, hilarious. Who thought that up?

'OK. They have to go as fast as they can. Obviously. But here's the thing. If they accidentally break into a run. They're disqualified.' Genius.

And the rowing. It relies on the one visual gag but, for me anyway, it never gets old. Usually in sports, the littlest guys run inconceivably long distances and the biggest guys lift unfeasibly heavy weights. And never the twain shall meet. But with rowing they came up with a sport where you need eight giants and a midget. Eight guys with big strong backs and thighs to do the rowing and one little guy with a megaphone to keep the beat and get them pointed in the right direction. I mean if they want to minimize the weight why don't they just use one of the girl gymnasts on her day off. Or go the whole hog and hire a dwarf.

The funniest bit is when the winning team line up to get their medals. They don't know what to do with the little guy. Put him at the front? At the back? Or they can try to lose him in the middle somewhere. I think one of the big guys should just tuck him under his arm.

But to get back to the synchronized swimming. They reason I brought it up is, how did it get to be an Olympic Sport? I mean it's not like they needed another swimming event. We all know that if somebody comes back from the Games with a double fistful of medals, they didn't do it without shaving their body hair and getting wet.

I suppose it's a fusion sport. Swimming, dancing and gymnastics. But that's no excuse. I can imagine a very entertaining beach-volleyball/wrestling mash-up. I only have to figure out the rules and I'm good to go. But I'd have to get sponsorship and funding and set up a league and... oh, never mind.

Synchronized swimming has a history though, back when it was known as water ballet. Maybe that's the thing. Is the reason Archery is in but Darts is out simply an issue of tradition?

I mean Archery has an ancient tradition in Britain. In some parts of the world the rudest hand signal is the raising of the single middle finger in the time-honored digitus impudicus, in others the thumb holds down the middle two fingers and flaunts the pinky and index finger as the horns of devil or cuckold, in some cultures a ring is made of the curled thumb and index fingers to mimic the distended arsehole of one who submits to sodomitical intercourse. Make of that what you will. Only Britain uses the manual insult where the index and middle fingers are raised in a backhanded spread V-sign. The story is that prior to the Battle of Agincourt of 1415 the French had threatened that captured archers would have their bow fingers amputated. After the English victory their archers are said to have waved their intact fingers to taunt the defeated French. The gesture remained.

In the early seventeenth century James the First issued a proclamation which would become known as the Declaration of Sports. In it he condemns 'Puritans and other precise persons' for interfering with the free practice of 'lawful sports' on a Sunday afternoon after church services. I'm not altogether sure what he means there by 'precise persons' but I suspect they are still around. They sound like the kind of people who police spelling and grammar on the YouTube comment feature. In any case, one of the few 'lawful sports' to be singled out by name is, of course, archery. Towns and villages had places set aside for the practice of this martial sport. This area was known as the butts. Yeah, try googling that to find out about archery.

It would be nice to be able to say that these ancient practices are conserved in place names like Newington Butts in south London. But a butt is also the name of any left over, off-cut bit of a field so often that was preserved in the name. There's no evidence that there was ever any archery at Newington Butts so if your tour guide tells you any different they're full of shit. In fact, if your tour guide takes you so far into South London that you can't see the river then your travel insurance is probably no longer valid.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Archery gets in because of its long and illustrious tradition but Darts doesn't. Even though Darts is just indoor archery. They both require a high level of hand/eye coordination and use of the muscles of arm and shoulder. I mean what does Archery have that Darts doesn't? Even the arithmetic is harder. You have to be able to count backwards and multiply by two and three. Not that I'm suggesting that arithmetic is a sport. But if getting a horse to roll over and show it's belly is, why the fuck not?

During the 2012 Olympics the archery competitions will take place in Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood. That's just north west of Regent's Park. Seriously posh London. Average house price two million quid. What?

'Now your mother she's an heiress, owns a block in St John's Wood. And your father'd be there with her. If he only could. But don't play with me 'cos you're playing with fire.'

Anyway, if you want to see a game of darts you're going to have to go to the pub.

But would you even see one there? I can't remember the last time I saw a dart board in a pub. Certainly not in any of the civilized areas of London. No financially competent gastro-pub is going to sacrifice the space of three paying tables to make room for the oche. Pub dart boards, I'm afraid, have already gone the way of the village butts.

Now we're truly ancient, can we be in the Olympics, please?

Greenwich, George Melly and the London Olympics 2012

Greenwich is home to the Royal Navy. The wide riverside facade of the Christopher Wren designed Royal Naval College has been greeted with fond relief by generations of homecoming sailors. It is both symbol and engine of a long seafaring tradition.

Who knows how many hundreds of books have been written about the Senior Service. Many readers will have their favorites. Maybe a biography of Admiral Lord Nelson or one of C S Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels. Mine is a wonderfully rumbustious memoir of an Able Seamen who served at the tail end of World War Two and through the early months of the peace.

George Melly never saw active service and never knowingly committed an act of bravery or self-sacrifice. But his book, 'Rum, Bum and Concertina', records that he did have a lot of fun. He spent most of his brief naval career on punishment duties or running up to London to hang out with the surrealist painters and poets among the refugees of the Parisian art world who had made their temporary home there, or having illicit sex with his comrades in the nooks and crannies of various of Her Majesty's Ships of the Line.

Not long after I read this book I was regaling some fellow dinner party guests with stories from it. When I concluded that the Navy sounded like a big gay love jamboree a rather tight lipped young man at the other end of the table said, 'Not on my watch, it isn't.'

Ooh er!

Notwithstanding George Melly's extra-curricular activities, the Royal Navy was a hugely successful organization and at one time policed the biggest land empire the world has ever known. When Queen Victoria was, as Leonard Cohen has it, 'stern governess of all those huge pink maps', Britain did indeed rule the waves.

So it made sense, when an international conference met in Washington D.C. In 1884, to agree on a Prime Meridian, a line of 0° longitude, that the British standard was chosen. And the British line goes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Not that there weren't competitors. At various time there were meridians defined that passed through Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Warsaw, Jerusalem and Antwerp among many other cities. There was one in Kyoto. In the United States, Philadelphia had one and Washington D.C. itself had another. Mecca had one.

But in 1884 , according to Wikipedia, 'over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it (Greenwich) as the reference meridian on their maps'. So Greenwich got the gig. And has it for the foreseeable future.

Although, there is currently an Islamic movement for Mecca to be the Prime Meridian. To this end the world's largest clock has been built and on 11 August 2010 (1 Ramadan, AH 1431) it was started up in that city. We'll see.

Despite the maritime associations of Greenwich it won't be the venue for any sailing or boating events during the Olympic Games. However, Greenwich Park, which occupies the ground between The Royal Observatory at the top of Greenwich Hill and The Old Royal Naval College at the bottom, will host the Olympic and Paralympic Equestrian competitions and the running and shooting section of the Modern Pentathlon.

A temporary Cross Country course will be laid out in the Park and a temporary arena will built within the grounds of the National Maritime Museum there. It's not clear at the moment which of these will be in the western hemisphere and which in the eastern.

Benjamin Franklin and the London Olympics 2012

A few years ago an American friend of mine returned home after six months in Europe. In remembrance of her trip she put a poster map of her favorite European city on her office wall. The boss squinted at it. 'What is that thing?'

Katie looked at him. It had the name across the top. 'London,' she said.

'Yeah, I know. But what's that wiggly thing going all the way across?' What was he talking about? She looked at the map again. Oh, right. 'That's the River Thames.'

Katie's boss didn't get it. Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been born and raised, grew up around the railroads, and Peachtree Creek had long disappeared underground. 'They have a river running right through the city?'

Yep. They have a river running right through it. In fact the river is pretty much the reason why the city is there in the first place. When the Roman Army under Julius Caesar was marching north after the invasion of 43 AD, the Thames, running from east to west across the width of the country, was their first serious geographical obstacle.

A bridge was built, a garrison was stationed and a community flourished around it. Londinium was born.

Two thousand years later the river has a rich sporting history and a living sporting tradition.

Now and again I take a morning run along the Thames in west London. My route follows the river from Mortlake to Putney, reversing the course of the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. If I am out early enough there might be a slight chill in the air and a light mist on the water. This is a stretch of the river with boating clubs on both the north and south banks. The dull rattle of rowlocks, the slap of sculls and the megaphone of a cox will sound along the river from a keen pre-commuting crew. If it is term time a couple of boats will be out from St Paul's School which is right there at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge.

If it's a long run I might go further east towards Chelsea which, three hundred years ago, saw an early exhibition of the new sport of swimming.

In 1726 London was the world center of the printing industry and the young American was learning the trade at one of the many print shops in the City of London. But that day was a holiday and he had fled upriver, away from the crowding and the industry and the stink of the city. What is now west London was then a landscape of meadows and marshes and country houses and little villages with a sophisticated and wealthy population.

Maybe the young American was showing off to his rich friends, maybe it was youthful exuberance or that thrill you feel in a fit and healthy body that just has to express itself in action, maybe as a teetotaller he was simply bored by the boozing Brits, but at some point he stripped off and dived from the boat into the water.

He was a keen swimmer and knew what he was about. He had read Melchisedech Thevenot's 1696 book The Art of Swimming and, in his own words, 'had from a child ever been delighted with this exercise, had studied and practis'd all Thevenot's motions and positions, added some of my own, aiming at the graceful and easy as well as the useful.'

The Thames is a strong tidal river. Nowadays, in central London, the river rises and falls by about twenty two feet and the tide and currents can run dangerously fast. I'm guessing that the tide was on its way out when the American jumped in. He wouldn't want to be swimming against it. Having been in town for almost a year and a half and he would have learned the river's habits by that time. This was also before the building of the embankments, which didn't come till the nineteenth century, so the river would have been somewhat wider and slower on that day in the seventeen hundreds.

In any case, everybody had a good time. The boaters followed the youngster all the way from Chelsea through Westminster to Blackfriars, the better part of five miles. On the way he entertained them with 'many feats of activity, both upon and under the water, that surpris'd and pleas'd those to whom they were novelties.'

The sport had to stop before they reached the perilous currents at London Bridge and when he got out of the water and shook the water from his long hair Benjamin Franklin must have been wonderfully exhausted and awash with endorphins.

His demonstration had been a great success. Off the back of it he was offered the job of swimming teacher to the sons of a wealthy aristocrat and if his plans for returning to America had not been so far advanced he might have taken the gig and had a successful career as a personal trainer to the British nobility.

It's anybody's guess whose face would have ended up on the hundred dollar bill then.

Nowadays if you see somebody jumping into the Thames in London the odds are it's a drunk or a suicide. So the Olympic swimming and diving events will be taking place elsewhere.

Not that that would always have been the case. The first few of the modern Olympics had the swimming events in open water. In the 1900 Paris Olympics, for example, they took place in the river Seine.

But today's pool-accustomed athletes don't expect to be treading river weed. The Freestyle, Breaststroke, Backstroke and Butterfly, which Ben Franklin so ably demonstrated that day in 1762, in all their various solos and relays and medleys, will be seen in the specially built Aquatics Centre at the new Olympic Park in Stratford in east London. This is also where the Paralympic Swimming, the Diving and the Synchronised Swimming will be held, and the swimming bits of the Modern Pentathlon.

But here's the good news. I mean the really good news. If you want to see an open air Olympic swimming event in historic London, you can. Because the 10K Marathon Swimming event will take place in the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park.

The Serpentine Pond, a dammed section of the now mostly underground Westbourne River, a tributary of the River Thames, may be home to wild swans, ducks, geese, the odd pelican and, allegedly, poisonous algae, but, come August, the world's elite endurance swimmers will be competing in it's waters for the glory of Olympic Gold.

Is that cool. Or what?

Ben Franklin would have loved it.

Resolution Running

My limbs are rubber and my breath comes like treacle. I'm running like a fucking fish.

Two and a half years ago I could run a hundred miles a week. More. I was hard and fast and lean and mean. I was a middle-aged motherfucking running machine.

Now I'm gasping like a gut-punched pensioner.

The doubt started when I opened the front door at nine thirty this morning on the second day of the year 2012 of the Common Era. It was cold. I went back upstairs and changed into a long sleeved top. Back downstairs I sat on the front step pulling on my running shoes and wondering if I should go inside again and fetch gloves.

Forget the gloves. Get going.

There's only one way to do this. Run slow. I know. It's obvious. I channel George Sheehan. Find the pace at which you could run forever. Forever? You're joking, right?

But I do it.

I make my steps as short as my breath. The old man shuffle.

Trying not to look like a new-year-resolution runner.

Don't kid yourself, buddy. That is exactly what you are.

Road to Endorphia Chapter 3 - Inverness to Fort Augustus

Awake in my bunk this morning I savour my body in it's many aches and it's rested readiness. Both feet are blistered and stiff and swollen and sore but everything else is fantastic. After a hundred and twenty miles in four days my resting heart rate is forty four beats a minute and my muscles and joints feel fine.

The body is the spirit. That all the experiences and sensations conventionally labeled as spiritual are physical in nature seems obvious to me. The low morale which accompanies physical fatigue. The uplift which follows a good night's sleep and a decent breakfast. The frontal lobe brain injuries which destroy love and conscience. William James gives us a bundle of examples of religious conversion coming at the back of a vigorous walk on the hills. Art is physical. Music is sound. Bach's two violins may invoke in us the most angelic of visions, but it begins in neurons firing in the brains of the violinists, it continues in the enervation of muscles, the motion of limbs, the friction of bow on string, the vibration of air and eardrum and ends in the brains of the listeners.

So much for proximate causes. But why music at all? In Songlines Bruce Chatwin speculates that the first languages were sung. And, yeah, a huge fraction of the world's people speak tonal languages. For me, the answer to, why music, lies in the beat. All music begins with the beat. What is it, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty beats a minute? The pace of sustained, aerobic running, endurance running, a hundred and fifty or so footfalls to the minute, springs from the genetic memory of the persistence hunting of our ancestors. Music is running remembered. Selah.

I’m up and out by nine thirty.

The Great Glen is one of the most distinctive features on a physical map of Scotland. A natural fault line, it cuts across the narrowest part of the Highlands from Inverness in the north east in a straight line south and west to Fort William. Three great lochs almost fill the valley, Loch Ness, Loch Oich and Loch Lochy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a huge engineering project, the Caledonian Canal, carved channels and built locks between these natural waters and forged a route navigable from the North Sea to the Atlantic, allowing sea-going vessels to avoid the dangerous seas around the north end of the island of Britain.

The official start (or finish) of the seventy three miles of the Great Glen Way is up at the castle. I head up there from the hostel and down the other side of the hill. It’s a sunny morning with a touristy feel to it.

I am careful making my way. I’ve got lost on the way south out of Inverness before and wasted hours on the wrong route. I get lost quite a lot, by the way. But if I’m careful I shouldn’t get lost on this trip until I get past Motherwell.

In a little grocer's shop I buy a couple of cans of food and some chocolate bars. Outside the shop a group of three teenage girls want me to go back inside and buy their cigarettes for them. Nah. I continue through the park and the waterside paths which take me through the southern suburbs of Inverness. Yes, suburbs as well as outskirts. Maybe there’s a suburban chip shop. Too late, too late. On the other side of Inverness I begin the climb out of the urban plain into the forested hills. Soon I pass the place I intended to camp last night so I feel as if I’ve caught up with myself. I manage some running. It is a joy to be running on paths rather than roads. And now I can’t get lost. I’m on the way.

As I run grass whips at my bare legs and I remember to be paranoid about ticks. In Britain ticks are known to carry Lyme disease and two other diseases I can’t spell but am frightened of. Ticks are bloodsuckers. They embed their mouth parts in your flesh and suck your blood until they are full and then fall off, bloated and gorged. If you find a tick attached to your leg you can’t just pluck it off because those ‘mouth parts’, yeah nothing as simple as plain old teeth, are spirally and barbed and just fixed into your flesh. If you pull at a tick before it’s ready to let go these disgusting alien mouth parts are likely to remain embedded in your flesh to rot and fester and give you gangrene till the only way to save your life is to have the infected limb carved off. I’m not really paranoid. I just don’t like the idea of weird alien species burrowing into my flesh and living off my life’s blood. Another reason to keep an eye out for them is that they like it dark and damp and hairy. So if you don’t spot them when they’re on your legs they crawl upstairs and live in your nads. I check that my special tick removal tool, the Tick Twister, is in a convenient pocket and try to relax.

For the first part of the route the path drifts away from Loch Ness up into the forest. I keep myself going with thoughts of lunch at the Abriachan Campsite. Yes I’ve been down this road before. It’s comforting to be on familiar ground. Even if it is mostly Forestry Commission land.

The Forestry Commission has a reputation for sucking the life out of the earth with endless gloomy acres of alien pine trees. Their website claims that is all in the past, they are completely reformed and they are now committed to biodiversity, environmental sustainability and saving the planet. Yeah. ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’

I plug on through the forest. The track varies. The older roads are easier on the feet. But the newer ones, recently carved by Forestry bulldozers have been surfaced with broken stones which stab at my tender plantar tissue. Now and again I turn the wrong way on an ankle. Ow! Shit!

Look, I’m not going to bang on endlessly about how my feet hurt. They hurt. OK? Relentlessly, and in ways I never imagined possible. But I’m not going to keep on about it. It’s boring me and I’m sure it’s boring you. So let’s just assume, unless I say otherwise, that my feet hurt.

I’m having to walk more than I want to. I’m not a huge fan of walking. I mean I’m happy enough to walk myself down to the shops or around an art gallery. But to actually go for a walk as if it was some kind of separate activity worth doing in and of itself seems complete madness to me. And there are people who sneak up on you with walks. My older sister does it all the time. You go to Anne’s for dinner and you’re sitting there afterward wondering how she can justify calling that a pudding when it didn’t have any chocolate or any cream in it. And suddenly everybody’s pulling their boots on and we’re going for a walk. Jeez. I find myself wanting to let them go without me so I can search the cupboards for chocolate biscuits.

Right now what I want to do is run. Technically, the difference, the only difference, between walking and running is that when you walk your rear foot doesn’t leave the ground until the leading foot lands. If you’re back foot takes off before the front foot hits then you are running. That’s the physical difference. And it sounds simple. It sounds like nothing. But in that brief moment when neither foot is in contact with the earth you are flying. And as you continue to run those moments string together into one continuous soaring flight of freedom. Your muscles feel it, your blood feels it, your heart feels it. The difference between walking and running is the difference between talking and singing.

But I don’t let it get to me. Injuries all heal eventually. My feet will get better and then I’ll be running again.

About fourteen miles from Inverness I get to Abriachan Campsite. The trail is winding its way through a wood when you become aware of hand-painted signs inviting you for coffee and cake, or camping, or caravan based bed and breakfast . If you are tempted by the signs, and honestly it’s worth it just for the sheer hand-knitted lentil-pressed eccentricity of it all, you can camp in their ecological campsite, wash in their eco-shower, take a dump in their eco-toilet and throw your garbage in their eco-waste disposal. At Abriachan you get the feeling they really do believe in saving the planet. These guys haven’t just stuck a green label on it. They are living the life.

The last couple of times I’ve stopped for coffee at Abriachan a lovely guy called Ruari has been there to serve my cafetierre. He is tall and gaunt and bearded with an impeccably authentic highland accent and a dry, iconoclastic wit. When he first saw that I was traveling in shorts, he delivered a doom-laden lecture on the natural history of ticks of which is the root of my fear of the little freeloaders. Before Ruari ticks weren’t even on my radar. Am I grateful for that?

Right now I’m feeling good but pretty hungry. Ruari isn’t there but Sandra serves me a bowl of chunky lentil soup with grainy bread. Lovely. I sit outside with the chickens free-ranging underneath the table and the rooster strutting around like a complete cock.

While I’m having my coffee an Australian cyclist heading north stops for a cuppa. Well, he might have been a New Zealander but the difference is not something I can get myself to care about.

When I ask to borrow his map to check some distances he’s like, ‘What? Haven’t you got a map?’

‘No. I haven’t got a map. I’m traveling light.’

They give you a pretty generous jug of java at the Abriachan Campsite and the caffeine has got me pretty agitated so I’m bristling up at the guy’s reluctance to help me out.

‘What’s the problem? Is it like a treasure map or something?’

So he digs it out of one of his panniers and I scan it to remind myself of the road ahead.

He pooh-poohs the idea of my reaching Fort Augustus by the end of the day and I wish him well on his journey ahead to Inverness and his flight back to the other side of the planet.

I buzz ahead on fake coffee energy and pretty soon I’m out of the little free enterprise enclave of the Abriachan Campsite and back into the Forestry running along their busted-rock roads on my busted-feet feet.

After a while the route is running along the hills above the lochside and there are, off and on, some pretty spectacular views of Loch Ness. The coffee jag wears off and I slow right down again till I’m pretty much dragging my arse.

Dragging your arse is a pretty miserable experience but if you find your pace and stay hydrated and munch on a square of chocolate every so often you can get through it. What makes it really miserable is rain. Now it has rained on me before on this trek, everything from drizzle to out and out pissing rain. But the rain that comes down as I drag my backside along the road to Drumnadrochit convinces me that my rain vocabulary needs extending. I could call it pissing rain and let it go at that. But that really doesn’t get close to capturing the intensity of this downpour, the sheer relentless wetness of it all. No. Pissing rain will not do.

This is horsepissing rain. And my unwaterproof waterproof jacket invites it in. Down my back and into my pants and down my legs and into my shoes which are now getting wet from below and from above. My vision is a lens-wet blur. My chocolate wrapper wets to a pulp. Acceptance. I put up no resistance. I do not flinch. I embrace the footsore wetness which is my life.

Eventually I reach a road and it is downhill into Drumnadrochit. I love Drumnadrochit for its name alone, this perfect pair of alliteratively-linked trochees is so unashamedly teuchter-sounding. But it doesn’t go so far as to fall into self-parody like the unfortunate Auchenshoogle. Drumnadrochit. Isn’t it melodic. It deserves to have the Loch Ness Centre and to be the spiritual home of the Loch Ness Monster Mystery.

But today Drumnadrochit is drookit. And so am I. I use the public toilets and then I spend a long time in a shop trying to pick good things to eat. Mostly I just want to hide from the rain but tonight I will be wild camping for the first time and I want a nice supper in my tent, something tasty that I can eat cold. I buy tinned sardines and chocolate.

Drumnadrochit is another of those small places that you can just walk right through with little chance of getting lost so pretty soon I am walking uphill again past some holiday cottages and into the trees. I’m really struggling now and though I’ve only managed eighteen miles all day I decide to get off the road and pitch my tent. The land on either side of the road is fenced-off Forestry. I clamber over the wire and climb up the slope looking for a relatively flat space.

I unshoulder my pack and take out my tent. I love my tent. The Coleman Kraz X1 one-person tent I bought last summer in Tiso in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street has already served me well on the West Highland Way and in the southern Carpathians. It is small and light, just over three and a half pounds, and a fantastic bargain at eighty quid. It has a double skin so I’ll be sleeping behind a ventilated, insect-proof mesh which in turn is protected by the super-waterproof outer tent. It takes five minutes to set up.

The quality of the tent notwithstanding I make a complete dog’s dinner of pitching it. I’ve got it on a slant and the pegs are fixed to the forest floor in what is effectively mulch but I need to get my weight of my left foot. I give up and get inside. I unroll and inflate my mattress and get in my sleeping bag. As I eat sardines and chocolate I grudgingly reflect that the antipodean cyclist was right. I am a whole chunk of miles short of Fort Augustus.

I wake to the sound of rain on the outside of the tent. I am warm enough. The double blanket of cloud cover and forest canopy has kept the chill from my little green igloo. In the night I have slid downslope and am jammed against one edge of the tent.

I lie there until the need to pee drives me out of my sleeping bag. Actually, I only climb half way out of the bag. I unzip a flap of the inner tent and pee from the left lateral position directing the steaming jet out onto the dew-beaded grass. It’s a man’s world alright. I clean up and wriggle back into my cocoon.

If you’re covering twenty or thirty or more miles a day on foot, a fair amount of it at a run, and you’re going to be doing that indefinitely then you need to allow your body to recover as you go. It does that best when it’s asleep. Without enough sleep, fatigue will wear you down to nothing. When I’m tired enough I can pretty much sleep anywhere. I’m happy to curl up at the side of the road and fall asleep. But if you want to have a quick slumber session in the open air and it happens to be pissing down with rain you have a problem. So the best time to sleep is when you’re in your tent. And one of the joys of wild camping is that you can stay in bed as long as you want. It’s not like I have to clock in. I let the pattering rain lull me back to sleep.

Some time later I twist the valve on my mattress and let my body weight deflate it. I get myself out of the sleeping bag and roll it up. I have to roll it and squeeze it in just the right way so that it will fit back into its own tiny little bag. And in turn that tiny little bag has to fit into the tiny little space reserved for it in the restricted capacity of the twenty litre Salomon back pack. And I have to do all that rolling and stuffing inside my cramped little tent so that it gets packed away dry. Oh yes, once it is in it’s little bag it gets double wrapped in plastic bags so that the rain doesn’t get to it during the day. The Salomon pack, wonderful as it is, is not waterproof.

Once the sleeping bag is stashed away I roll and squeeze the remaining air out of the mattress. This is another item whose packing has to be done just so. It is waterproof though, so when it has been bagged up it gets strapped to the outside of the back pack by a little bunjee cord.

I find a pair of dry socks, may favourite Hilly Mono Skin running socks. I put them on my dry feet which I cleaned last night with baby wipes. Lovely. Wet socks get attached to the outside of the back pack in the hope that there will be enough sunshine during the day to dry them off. There is a plastic bag with an empty sardine tin, chocolate wrapper and used baby wipes. I tie that plastic bag also to the outside of the back pack where it will stay till I find a bin. From the pocket on the wall of the tent I take my watch. Nine thirty.

I stash everything that needs to be stashed in pockets and pouches and throw the back pack outside.

The rain has stopped now and I can see the crawling shadows of midges all over the outside of the tent. Midges are horrible. Only about, what, three millimetres long, they are slow, flimsy little insects, easily squashed. But it’s the numbers. Clouds of them, thousands upon thousands. They crawl all over any exposed flesh nipping and biting. They don’t bother you when you are on the move so when you are running or walking you are OK. But right now, when I am taking down the tent I will be most vulnerable. I take the Jungle Formula and spray my hands, rubbing it into the backs and palms and the webs of my fingers. I spray again and rub the liquid round my wrists and far up my forearms beyond where I will tightly velcro my sleeves. I rub it into my face, ears, neck, throat and hair. I wear my waterproof trousers so I won’t have to spend an age midgie-proofing my legs but I do rub some bug juice around my belly and back above my waistband. They have crawled up under my jacket before and left a big patch of their nasty little blisters.

Finally I put on my shoes. I have left this to last. Because for the first time since leaving John O’Groats I wasn’t able to dry them on a radiator last night. I put my dry-socked dry feet into the cold wet Wave Riders. I feel the cold wetness seep into my socks. Yuk. I tie the laces tight and crawl outside.

The tent comes down quickly. I work fast. The midges mob me and taste. They don’t Like the Jungle Formula. Ha ha. I fold the poles. I fold and roll and bag both inner and outer tents. I pull and count pegs. At last everything is stuffed in the back pack. I shoulder the pack and clip both belly and chest straps. I look around to check I’m not leaving anything behind. I walk down the hill and clamber over the fence. I’m on the road again.

Today is much like yesterday. I struggle up and down forest tracks more or less stony. But the route runs closer to the loch now, and often there are views down the long wide water and across to the hills on the other side. Now and again a white flicker of sail or hull gives scale to the immensity of it all. Remember, Loch Ness is longer than the English Channel is wide. And colder. That the world record for swimming the length of the loch is held by a woman is evidence that given a long enough distance and harsh enough conditions women can excel over men at endurance sports. Obvious really. Just think childbirth/man-flu. Still, I comfort myself that no matter how tough a woman is she still can’t take a piss without getting all the way out of her sleeping bag.

There is nobody else on the road. Apart from the shop assistant in Drumnadrochit I haven’t spoken to another human being since the cyclist with the pirate map at Abriachan. I wish I had a map now. It’s not like I’m going to get lost but I want to know where the next town is so I know when I’m gonna have breakfast. I try to remember what the next town on from the Drum is but it just won’t come to me.

It turns out that the next burg on the way south is Invermoriston. Of course it is. And fourteen miles and five hours later when I find it I am dizzy with hunger and drunk with fatigue. I walk past the Invermoriston Hotel. I am still blanking them because last summer they refused to serve me coffee one night at about nine o’clock when I was powering my way up the glen in an attempt to do the hundred and seventy miles from Glasgow to Inverness in five days. I needed to get a few more miles done before bedding down for the night and reckoned that a jolt of caffeine would be just the thing to keep me going. But although the restaurant and the bar were both open for some reason the making of a cup of coffee was a catering task too far. This is a big posh hotel for goodness sake. But no it wasn’t possible.

‘We have a selection of alcoholic and soft drinks.’ He said (I swear he did), indicating the gantry with a sweep of his hand.

I had the same thing in Edinburgh once. I asked for a coffee in the White Horse on the Royal Mile. The barman glared at me.

‘Ah’m jist here masel.’ (I’m working unaccompanied.) he said.

The clear implication was that he considered the making of a cup of coffee to be at least a two person job. Now, I’m not an experienced innkeeper. But I can make a cup of coffee all on my own. In fact, if I have a big enough kettle and a selection of mugs I can make coffee for as many as half a dozen people at a time. What is the big deal about getting a cup of coffee (instant would do) in a place whose business it is to serve drinks? That goes for the Invermoriston Hotel and the White Horse.

So I take a shortcut through the Hotel carpark scattering their too-tidy gravel as I go and I scowl through the windows at a couple of old ladies having afternoon tea. That’ll teach them. I stock up on tinned food and chocolate bars at the shop across the road and then follow the signs for the Glen Rowan Restaurant where they haven’t yet made the mistake of thwarting my coffee expectations.

I find I like the Glen Rowan Restaurant. It is light and clean and crisp. I am unwashed, unshaven and sodden-footed and definitely feel out of place, but the waitress makes me feel welcome. I plug in my iPhone for a recharge as I consult the menu. I go for the three-bean chilli with wild rice. It comes with fresh, leafy, tomatoey salad. Nice. I have room for an apple pie and ice cream chaser. Yum. Pudding is followed by a pot of tea. Aaaah! I note the gleaming chrome of the espresso machine behind the counter and I’m reassured that, had I felt the urge, the pleasant, efficient staff of the Glen Rowan would have been more than happy to serve me with a cappuccino, a latte or an americano as fine as anything you could get on the King’s Road. Lovely.

I don’t linger too long over my tea. I have miles to go before I sleep. I use the toilet, refill my water bag and get going. It has been showering on and off but it is dry as I leave the restaurant.

My pack never seems to be as light as I expect it to be. Full of water and with a couple of tins of food on board it is as heavy as it gets, which must be fourteen or fifteen pounds. That’s pretty lightweight but it’s still quite a load if you want to run. The food is lying pretty heavy too and the miles (about seven of them) between Invermoriston and Fort Augustus are a real slog.

It’s coming on evening by the time I get to Fort Augustus. As I hike into the town I find myself walking behind two young Americans. I’ve been starved of human contact all day so I’m leeching onto their conversation. One of them is telling the other that he is an engineering major and plans to be a project engineer. He explains in considerable detail to his less than attentive companion how he is going to achieve this goal. By the time our paths diverge I’m pining for the hermit life again.

Fort Augustus is a little place straddling the canal where a series of five locks slows the water traffic and marks the beginning of the channel from the great Loch Ness to the lesser Loch Oich to the south. The locks make an impressive focus at the centre of a pretty little village and it’s easy to see why the place is such a big tourist draw. From my point of view I am just happy to be hungry again because it would be a shame not to take advantage of the Canalside Chip Shop. Its yellow-painted front is right there facing the locks. I cross over the canal and pop inside. The Canalside Chip Shop works on a triple whammy of big portions, reasonable quality and low prices. I order a sausage supper.

Just so you know, when you order a supper in a Scottish chip shop, as in fish supper, haggis supper, pakora supper or whatever, ‘supper’ simply means ‘with chips’.

While I am waiting for my meal the two mature ladies who are running the show chat between themselves and with a variety of locals who pop their heads round the door from time to time. You could call it gossip. You could call it folk news. Whatever you call this verbal exchange of innuendo, opinion and speculation about who was drunk when and who is shagging who and who has just given their pregnant girlfriend a black eye it is much more entertaining than the career plan of the nascent project engineer.

I have my supper sitting outside being gobsmacked by the engineering wonder of the lock system and watching prowling tourists being similarly gobsmacked. It is quite gobsmackingly impressive.

The American engineering student was in the right place if he was looking for a role model. Thomas Telford was the designer, project engineer, what-have-you on the Caledonian Canal. Now I don’t want to go all tour-guidey on you but seriously, this guy was a legend. He also built the Gotha Canal in Sweden, other huge canals in England and Wales, Portsmouth Docks, the Menai Bridge, towns, more bridges, aqueducts and about a zillion miles of road including the A5, from Holyhead to London, yeah the A5, he finished it in 1826. Check him out on Wikipedia.

By the time I am struggling with my last few chips (I need the calories) my pyloric muscle is clenched as tight as a tick’s arsehole.

I walk out the other side of town along the wide, stony canalside path. The route follows the canal now and all I have for camping is a scrubby margin of land between the canal and the river. What river? I don’t know. I haven’t got a map, remember.

Once I am past the meagre outskirts of Fort Augustus I climb the fence and scratch around for a flat, dry patch of ground. I clear some raggedy undergrowth and pitch up, hammering pegs into the stony earth with a rock. I crawl inside, blow up my mattress and crawl into my sleeping bag. Pretty soon I am asleep.

Road to Endorphia Chapter 2 - Latheron to Inverness

This morning I wake with a bounce from deep, untroubled sleep. My brain has been soaking in endorphins all night. I feel fantastic. Muscles a bit stiff but otherwise I'm born again. I mean it, reborn in the spirit, brother, breathing hosannas and farting hallelujahs.

This is why I run. This is why anybody runs. So that you wake up feeling like you could jump the moon.

And I should feel good. I ran thirty five miles yesterday but it was thirty five miles I was fit for. I've been training hard this spring and I've done some serious mileage, working up to a hundred and twenty miles a week. My peak was a week of thirteen ten mile runs. And in order to make sure all my niggling training injuries are properly healed I've just had a two week break from running. I feel good, you know that I should, so good.

I have a quick wash. I don't shave. I have decided shaving is a luxury. And I have scraped a fraction of an ounce from my heavy load by doing without razors. Dressing is easy. The same running shorts as yesterday. I have only packed one pair. Truth, I only own one pair. The lightweight Mizuno shorts with the comfortable man-gusset, the drawstring tie, the ruched, elasticated waistband and rear, zippered key pocket were another endorphin-fuelled purchase from Run and Become. I mean, I love them, but you better believe I won't be paying thirty five quid for another pair of shorts before you can count the hairs on my arse through the faded fabric of this pair. I own three technical-fabric running tops but I've only brought the long-sleeved one with me, the one my sister Liz bought me for Christmas. I can wear the sleeves rolled up when it's warm and roll them down when it's cold. I do have clean socks. Four pairs of good quality running socks. When will I wash my clothes? I don't know. When I can.

I dance downstairs to find the breakfast room.

A pair of guests are already there, seated and spreading things on toast. They are easily in their seventies and manage to look both spry and sedate at the same time. They have been walking with a guided group in the North Western Highlands. The tour over, they decided to drive across country and then down the east coast to visit relatives (I lost who was married to who and when, because I wasn’t really listening) they haven’t seen since blah blah blah.

Normally I am offended by walkers as a group every bit as much as much as cyclists but the old couple seem intelligent and nice enough and if they are users of those little walking poles at least they had the good sense to leave them out of sight so I don’t feel compelled to bash them over the head with the things.

But they do insist on asking sensible questions. Questions I don't feel the need to have answers to. Sensible people make my head itch. And I don't mean my scalp. I mean the inside of my skull. As they talk I feel crystals form in the fluid part of my eyeball.

'Are you running for a charity?'

They always want you to explain yourself. You can't just do something.

'No.'

'It's a personal challenge then?'

No it isn't. I hate that whole protestant vocabulary of challenge and achievement. My brainpan crawls with an unresolved and unreachable tingling.

The food arrives.

I breakfast on porridge, poached eggs, tomatoes, toast, fruit juice, coffee and I’m ready to go again.

Not far south of Latheron, now on the A9, is Berriedale Braes, a series of long, steep, winding ups and downs. I hit it when I’m fresh enough to enjoy to the fullest a sweaty fusion of sunshine and effort. At one point I pause to chat to an Australian cyclist who has stopped to take in the view. Look how tolerant I am. He has come all the way from Lands End. Out come the iPhones. We take each other’s photographs and split.

Beyond the Braes the road is much as it was the day before, a freehand line drawn to roughly follow the coast.

There’s going to be three and a half days of road running before I get to Inverness and the start of the Great Glen Way with it’s mix of forest tracks and canalside and woodland paths. On that kind of mixed terrain the feet impact at a variety of angles on surfaces hard and soft and in between, tarmac and mud, packed stones and earth, grass. If your feet are hitting the ground a hundred and fifty times a minute for several hours every day you need to spread the stresses.

But running on the same side of this cambered road, my feet striking the hard surface again and again at this unnatural angle, always nagging at me is the road runners constant worry, stress injury.

During the long miles of training over the winter and spring I developed a plethora of injuries, some just plain irritating, some painful and crippling. There was off and on again Achilles tendonitis, of course, quite mild usually but sometimes requiring up to three days of rest. For a few days in early May I was bothered by a tightness of the anterior tibialis, the front calf muscles, on my right leg like nothing I've ever had before. I mean tight tight, you could have hammered a nail in there and it wouldn’t have bled. It took an hour of running before it loosened up sometimes. But during the latter half of May I eased back on the mileage and let my body heal itself as much as possible.

Right now the soles of my feet feel as if they have been tenderised by a steak hammer, as if the protective dermal sock of my foot has been peeled off from the sole and I am running on raw nerve endings. But nothing much else. Not so far.

And now it starts to rain, and not the gentle rain of yesterday. Today’s rain is proper rain. Pissing rain.

And so it goes, mile after mile along the edge of the road, slightly canted, each foot striking at an odd angle, striking and rolling and twisting, twisting, twisting, and scowling at the oncoming traffic through wobbling wet lenses.

Sometime between last summer’s trek in the southern Carpathians and today my waterproof jacket has lost it’s waterproof and pretty soon I am soaked. And the dry, sunny miles of the morning become the wet, miserable miles of the afternoon.

But I am aware of today’s target and I keep plugging away until I reach Helmsdale, eighteen miles down from Latheron, and stop for a late lunch in the Bannockburn Inn.

I have cornish pastie, chips and beans. That’s the special but, truth be told, it ain’t that special. I reload with calories while I watch what looks like the German version of X Factor on TV. When the sequins stop spinning and it cuts to the judges there’s David Hasselhoff . Wait a minute, am I watching American X Factor dubbed into German? WTF! No but, the Hoff is huge in Germany, or so I’ve heard. Maybe he is a judge on German X Factor.

The rain eases off in the afternoon. I keep plugging away.

Hours later I am getting closer to Golspie. I know this because there are signs by the road proclaiming Golspie’s Prizewinning Beaches. I’m not kidding. The North Sea beaches of Golspie in the extreme north east of Scotland, ninety miles north of Inverness, win prizes. Fantastic. I resist the urge to make a detour. Neither do I break my journey for Dunrobin Castle. I see the gate and the beginnings of a leafy driveway but that’s it. I’m not sightseeing.

And so I arrive in Golspie which, depending on whether you put your faith in Google Maps, the official road signs or the old Victorian waymarker outside the Sutherland Hotel, is either 68, 72 or 73 miles from John O’Groats. I’m going with the Victorians. They have precedence. And that means I’m averaging 36.5 miles a day so far. Hoo Rah!

The Sutherland Hotel looks a bit posh so I look around for something a bit humbler. Now, the problem with these little towns is you have to be careful not to overshoot them. Walk a bit too far and you’re in among the sheep again.

I see a young girl out walking a dog so I ask her, indicating the road ahead, “Is there much more round the corner?”

She looks a bit embarrassed, “No. This is pretty much it.”

The Stag’s Head looks more my style and John, the landlord, is happy to come out from behind the reception desk and show me upstairs to a room.

For thirty quid I have a stained carpet, a view of the bins and a tiny, windowless bathroom. But hey, there is a bath. It isn’t a great bath. It’s not a beautiful bath. It’s certainly not the bath that Cleopatra filled with ass’s milk. Though it smells like it might have been. No, wait, that’s the carpet. But it is a bath.

While the bath is filling I peel off my clothes and log my injuries. General muscle soreness in shoulders, back and legs (seventy plus miles in two days, what do you expect). Significant chafing to lower back and scrotum (Vaseline must have worn off, gonna sting when I lower myself into that hot water). Sunburnt forehead (when did that happen?). Suspicious twinge forward of left ankle (a bit worrying). Blister on sole of left foot. Fantastic.

Remember, folks. Endurance running is the socially acceptable face of self harm. Don’t let all that charity fundraising fool you. The athlete in training pounding the pavement mile after gruelling mile is chasing the same endorphin hit as the troubled individual who takes a razor blade and cuts into the soft part of his arm. The reward comes when the brain detects the pain and counteracts it with biochemical carriers of fun. Cutter and runner are the same, and equally deserving of your admiration or contempt. Whatever.

When I wake I am as stiff and sore as the morning after a marathon. The twinge in my left foot is now red and swollen and protests when I put any weight in it. I pull the laces of my Mizuno Wave Rider extra tight and hobble downstairs to the restaurant.

Breakfast, which is included in the thirty quid, is an aggressively carnivorous affair of sausages, bacon, eggs, fried bread and black pudding. Eating it is an almost out of body experience. I watch myself cutting and forking and chewing as if it is somebody else. I know what I am doing is really stupid but I can’t seem to stop. My body demands that yesterday’s calorie debt be paid.

Once outside I start walking south out of town. I want to lie down. I mean I really, really, really want to lie down. I want to lie down like a snake wants to lie down. I want to lie down because no alternative is possible. All my blood is in my belly dealing with breakfast. My pack hurts my shoulders, my back and my hips. My legs hurt. I mean they hurt, hurt. They hurt in all their constituent muscles. My feet hurt. My left foot especially hurts every time it pushes against the ground. I feel like the day’s end rather than the beginning. I have no idea how to start running. I want to lie down. Did I say that already?

What doesn't hurt? My knees. Yeah, my knees don't hurt. My knees never hurt. Never. It may comfort the couch-surfing sedentarist to believe that we runners are jogging along on borrowed time, yomping toward that day in late middle age when our knees just crumble into dust leaving us wheelchair-bound and bitter. But it doesn't feel like that right now. And, guess what. The science doesn't support the crumbling knee myth either. It's looking as if running strengthens the knee joints. Ha ha. Fuck you.

I keep walking. Soon enough Golspie runs out of sidewalk and I cross over to the right hand side of the road to face the oncoming traffic. It is Monday morning. The traffic is heavier than yesterday.

So I walk. And then I run. I run till my foot hurts too bad. Then I walk again. The landscape is the same boring shit as the last two days. Fields full of sheep. Staring and munching grass. Munching grass and staring. Is that all sheep can do? Stare and munch grass? Don’t they ever do anything else? Don’t they ever dance?

I walk and I run. It is a battle. Bloody-mindedness versus pain. And I walk and I run.

And I do this for ten miles. But here’s the thing. I can force myself to run on this damaged foot for long enough. I am that bloody-minded. But I have to run on it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. And so on for a thousand odd miles, all the way to Lands End. I don’t know if it is this argument that convinces me or simply the sheer physical fatigue I am experiencing but there comes a point when I know I am not going to run again that day. And I walk.

Further south the sea strikes inland up the wide waters of the Dornoch Firth. Spanning the estuary is the new bridge. I love to run across a long bridge but I can’t push myself beyond a walk. Still, it lifts my spirit, the wide water and the shallows and wetlands and the seabirds and the wide open sky.

It’s approaching five o’clock and the next town is Tain. When I get there I will only have managed fifteen miles all day. Tain isn’t on the A9 itself. It lies parallel to it. So before I reach the town I have to make a decision whether to go further or to turn off the main road and call it a day.

I lie down in the grass by the side of the road. I am bone weary but can’t make a decision. The noise of the traffic stresses me. I snack and doze, waiting for my energy to kick back in, I suppose. But it hasn’t done that all day. I think maybe I am delaying the decision because even if I decide to spend the night in Tain there’s a walk of a mile or so before I can find a place to sleep. OK. Sod this. Tain it is. I get up and cross the road.

It turns out to be a painful mile. My feet hurt. I mean everything else hurts but my feet are the twin peaks of hurt in a whole landscape of pain. Actually, they aren’t twin peaks. The left one still hurts more that the right. Yeah, yeah, whatever. At the first guest house I find they are full up but the owner gives me directions to another. More weary walking. Now I have a room. The guest house lady gives me directions to the town centre where I can find an evening meal but although I am famished I can’t face walking another yard. I have a tin of beans in my pack and there is a selection of biscuits with the tea and coffee in my room. That’ll have to hold me until breakfast.

I have a shower then crawl under the covers and fall asleep.

Later in the evening I wake up again. I find the remote and fire up the wall-mounted television. I channel hop for a bit until it narrows down to a choice between a documentary about surveillance society Britain and Celebrity Wife Swap. I'm not feeling this is an improvement on yesterday's Kraut Factor. Doesn't anybody have Sky up here? I want Discovery Channel. I want Mythbusters.

Celeb Wife Swap is really pushing the boundaries because one of the wives is, technically, not a wife but, in fact, a lesbian partner. I've seen Rhona Cameron on a Saturday night at the Comedy Cafe in Rivington Street completely rip the room up. She was a force of nature, easily one of the greatest standup performers I have ever seen. What's she doing on this shit? Paying the mortgage I suppose. I watch Rhona and Stan Boardman bicker for half an hour and then try to get back to sleep.

I don’t enjoy the solid, completely powered-down, snorefest slumber of the nights in Latheron or Golspie. I feel off-key, medicated even. It is clear now that my left foot is definitely injured. I try to ignore the very real possibility that I might not even be able to walk in the morning. I go all new-agey and direct the healing power of the cosmos at my left foot.

I am the only guest for breakfast. However, I don’t feel alone. There is another almost palpable presence in the room. Around the walls, on the sideboard and various little tables are photographs. All of the same person. There he is as a cherubic, fair-haired infant, there again as a smiling blonde schoolboy. I turn my head and there he is once more, older now, a teenager, but still smiling, still blonde and still impeccably turned out in his school uniform. There are other poses, but always he is alone, unaccompanied by a less perfect sibling or a scruffier cousin. And there he is on that magical day in the cap and gown of graduation still smiling in all his blonde, angelic perfection.

I hate him beyond reason. And I find myself hating his mother too, the guest house lady, for the meanness of the portion of porridge she gives me. Jeez. Can you even buy bowls this small? I swear I’ve sneezed bigger than this. I bet angelboy gets all the porridge he wants.

I am frustrated by the whole breakfast issue. The whole food thing in fact. I just can’t seem to find big enough sources of carbohydrates. My breakfast at home would be a helping of porridge easily five or six times the size of this baby serving. Aaaarrrgggh! I fill up with toast and marmalade and eggs and bacon and mushrooms and get the hell out of there. I hope he turns out to be a serial killer, you old witch. Dennis Nilsen was from Fraserburgh. That's just along the coast, you know.

Tain is a proper town. It has shops and pubs and a post office and a Co-op where I buy a slab of dark chocolate for the journey ahead. It has a big, granite town hall with a big clock (striking ten) and more than one street so I have to consult Google Maps to find my way back to the A9.

Oh yeah. I can walk. I’m still all stiff and sore and my feet still hurt but I am pretty refreshed and yes, I can walk. Fantastic.

It’s thirty four point two miles to Inverness from where I am now. If I get my thirty five miles done today that gets me to the other side of the city and up the hill onto the Great Glen Way. I can pitch my tent in the trees and in the morning I will wake up on familiar ground. And off the cursed A9 at last.

In the meantime there’s the A9. South of Tain it’s more of a road. Dual carriageway, heavier traffic, more freight. Less fun. Such as it was. I don’t know the area around here. Before this trip I have never been north of Inverness. But the place names, Invergordon, Tain, Nigg Bay, are familiar from stories my brother William has of building oil rigs back in the early eighties, crawling round the massive structures with a welding torch.

I walk and walk, pushing myself pretty hard. And sometimes I run. But when I run I can’t even manage the old man shuffle. Limping with both feet now, I move in a kind of rolling hirple. What do I feel like? I feel like what I am. A middle aged man with two busted feel running along the side of the road in the pissing rain. Fuck. I don’t know how to tell you what this feels like. Maybe you don’t care. There’s no reason why you should. But just in case. Imagine this. Think of a town about thirty miles from you. Now wait till a dose of the flu coincides with a rainy day and walk there. Oh yeah, and before you start, hit both of your feet with a hammer. Hard.

I don’t even have the luxury of being able to feel sorry for myself. This is entirely voluntary. I’m not a fleeing refugee. I’m not a prisoner, or a conscript on a forced march. This is my holiday. Idiot. And then the growling engine of bloody-mindedness kicks in and I realise I am enjoying this. This is fun. Haaaaah! Haaaaaah! And the harder it gets the more fun it is. Haaaaaaaah! I roar at the rain and I howl at the road. ‘Is that all you’ve got. Huh? Is that all you’ve got.' And, for a while, that works.

But defiance takes energy. What you really need if you want to keep going forever, no matter what, is not defiance, but acceptance. You close down everything you don’t need. You close down choice. There is no choice. You just keep going. Close down feeling. No pleasure, no pain. This is just the way it is. Close down effort to a bare minimum. Find the rhythm and the pace that allows you to keep going with the minimum of effort. And keep going. Close down thought. Count, chant, sing, but don’t think. Thinking reminds you how far you have to go and how much it hurts.

When I cross the bridge to the Black Isle I can see over on the left my brother Willie’s oil rig platforms. This is another long bridge. The Black Isle (actually a peninsula) is bounded on the North by the Cromarty Firth and on the south by the Moray and Beuly. The A9 will take me across the Black Isle and once over the next bridge I’ll be in Inverness.

I love bridges. Properly understood a bridge is not a noun but a verb. A bridge is a crossing of rivers and chasms. It is a joining of communities and an enabling of journey and trade. It transcends landscape while celebrating its geometry. Once, crossing the Thames from St Paul's to Tate Modern on the day of a rare London storm the wind reminded me it could toss me into the air. Inside the gallery, free of the wind's grip, everything seemed spiritless, Anish Kapoor's big trumpet thing so much bombastic junk. On the bridge outside I had been buffeted by the fist of the storm god. That was real.

Hours later I cross that other bridge and find myself in the kind of dockland/industrial outskirts of the city. In four days of trekking, Inverness is the first place I have been which is big enough to actually have outskirts. So there’s a dispiriting amount of weary plodding past warehouses and hangars where the only sign of human activity is the occasional discarded Buckfast bottle. Oh yes, the green bottle with its distinctive fruity label is a sure sign we have reached civilisation. Buckfast Tonic Wine is the preferred tipple of the Scottish urban underclass. A sweet, syrupy, fortified wine beloved of street drinkers, wife beaters and football hooligans, the empty bottle often doubles as an improvised weapon. It really is Scotland’s Other National Drink. Any History of Scotland in 100 Objects would have to have a Buckie bottle right up there in the top ten with bagpipes and shortbread.

Now I reach a jumble of streets, crossing each other, going uphill and down. I need to find something to eat. Just a takeway. Chips. Yeah, chips. But I should know better than to get fixated on a particular type of food. That’s setting yourself up for disappointment. But it’s just chips, for god’s sake. That’s not asking a lot. This is a city after all.

I feel like Zarathustra just come down from the mountains. I bet he was dying for a bag of chips as well. Big fat ones. Soggy with vinegar. Yeah.

I find myself standing in the street looking downhill, wondering which way to go, not wanting to waste energy walking in the wrong direction when a door opens behind me.

‘You wanting to book in?’

‘Uh?’

I turn round and see that I am standing outside a backpackers hostel. Result.

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

I follow the young guy inside and he books me in.

‘Cheapest bed?’

What did he mean by that? Do I look cheap? Do I look like a down and out? Well, yeah.

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

‘Ten pounds please.' Nice.

Anyway he sorts me out with a bed and a key and then I am able to ask.

‘Where’s the nearest chip shop?’

‘Oh, right. Just down the hill and turn right. No, no. Wait a minute. There was a fire. On Thursday. The chip shop got burned out.’

You have got to be kidding.

‘Is there another one?’

‘No. That was it I’m afraid.’

I do not believe this. This is a city. A city for goodness sake. Surely, surely, in the name of all that we hold dear of civilisation and culture on this blessed island, in order to qualify as a city you have to have at least one working chip shop.

It grows dark while I wander the streets. I remember that I had intended to get beyond the city and into the hills today. That will have to wait until tomorrow. Tonight I need a meal and tomorrow morning I will have to shop for food for the day ahead.

I find myself missing London. There is probably more going on in Putney High Street this Tuesday evening that in this whole jockforsaken city, I decide. What do they do up here? What do they make? Yeah, yeah, OK. North Sea oil. Whatever.

Up the hill and across the road from the castle (of course, there’s castle) I find MacDonalds. Oh well, it’s got an authentic Scottish name.

I have a Big Mac Meal. The burger is pretty dried out and the chips (seriously, are they allowed to call them chips) are much too salty, but it’s all very easy to eat. And the big sugary drink is welcome.

When I’m finished eating I sit there for a while. I feel really chilled out now. I’ve eaten. I’m rehydrated. I know where I am going to sleep. And I’m doing OK. I’ve done a hundred and twenty miles of road running in four days. Thirty miles a day. That’s not bad. That’s good. I’m tired though. Woooo, I’m tired.