Miles to Go

 The Big Issue challenged me to walk a hundred miles in July.  My first thought was, ‘Sure, why not?’  My second was, ‘Wait, they want me to have a Facebook account?  Nah, that’s way too much work!’

In any case, one hundred miles in a month – little more than three miles a day – didn’t really sound like much of a challenge.  So instead, I decided to do a sponsored walk of two hundred miles in July, and raise money for a choice of charities, whichever sponsors feel deserve my money more.

The first charity was obviously still going to be the Big Issue Foundation, the support organisation that helps homeless magazine-vendors to deal with the problems that made them homeless in the first place.  This can include helping vendors to find housing, access healthcare, learn to manage their money, improve their education, and apply for jobs.  The past year and a half has been a particularly tough time to be homeless, or to make a living by selling a magazine on the streets, and Big Issue vendors could do with some support.

I also wanted to raise money for a charity that helps people out of poverty in other countries, and a conservation charity.  TreeAid, which works in Africa, aims to do both, by planting trees to provide local people with food and a way of earning a living, and to protect more land from turning into desert.

This was the first time I had tried to organise a sponsored event for myself, so my first challenge was to work out how to set up a JustGiving page where people could donate to these charities.  As I wasn’t sure what I was doing, I accidentally clicked on TreeAid’s Future Forest appeal, to protect Metema Forest in Ethiopia.  For this appeal, the UK government has promised to double your gift – if you donate before 11^th July.  So if you trust me to complete my challenge, you might consider donating to Future Forest now, but otherwise, you might prefer to wait till the end of the month and donate to TreeAid in general, or to the Big Issue Foundation.

Two hundred miles, though?  Is that really a challenge?  It’s between seven and eight miles a day, which isn’t really a lot, when I’m unemployed and have no other responsibilities. Five years ago, I used to run six miles at the gym before work, just to use the gym’s showers, to avoid arguments with my landlady about hogging her bathroom.  On top of that, the walk to and from the gym was around a mile, the walk to and from work another three miles, which makes ten miles before you add in all the walking around I did at work.

Five years ago, I was a lot fitter than I am now.

I was also a lot crazier than I am now.

I never got the euphoric rush of endorphins that exercise is supposed to bring.  I just burned up too many calories and got hangry and paranoid from low blood sugar.  I ran to and from work screaming, though I tried to quieten down when I approached my lodgings, as my landlady complained about the noise. 

My landlady grew increasingly fed up with me (understandably, under the circumstances).  After a while, she complained about my making any noise (even if I was just coughing or laughing), and eventually she evicted me with a reference warning prospective landlords that I was trouble.  And this is how, if my parents hadn’t been able to take me in until I could find a landlord who didn’t ask to see references, I might well have ended up homeless.

I could claim that this is why I’m fundraising for the Big Issue Foundation, but it’s not true.  Some of my best friends are or have been homeless, I’ve read the Big Issue since I was a child, and I’ve always cared about poverty and homelessness, whether they threatened me personally or not.  Besides, the Big Issue has changed my life: the small ads in the back encouraged me to write to prisoners on Death Row and to take up full-time voluntary service, and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss either experience.

Now, though?  I’m not working, not volunteering, and not exercising as much as I could, and my body is getting lazy.  In the past week, I’ve done one fifteen-mile walk to Clandown on my own, and one ten-mile walk to Cranmore with PDB11.  Ten miles felt about right, but the fifteen-mile walk absolutely exhausted me.  I wasn’t just footsore; my hip-joints felt as if my legs were coming loose.

So, walking two hundred miles in a month is a challenge partly because I’m out of practice.  It’s also a challenge because I’m walking mostly on my own, and navigation isn’t my strong point.  Part of the length of the Clandown walk was doubling back after I’d realised that I had misread the map and was about to turn in the opposite direction to the one I wanted (thank God for compasses and road signs).  Another was retracing my steps after I realised that I had dropped my compass, until I found it hanging on a nettle several fields earlier. 

I’m not clear about what route I took through Midsomer Norton, except that I wound up in the familiar embrace of the High Street with the River Somer running through it.  

I stopped for a well-earned break at this point.

Anyway, I’ll do my best with this challenge, it’s tempting to hope that I might manage more than two hundred miles, once I start getting into the swing of things.  If the weather turns foul, I might even go to a gym to keep fit on days when outdoor walking isn’t practical.  I’ll log gym miles separately from outdoor miles, if you’d rather sponsor me for just the outdoor bit.  You could decide now what you want to donate if I complete 200 miles, or decide to pay me (for example) 10p per mile, and wait to see how much I manage.

What will I do in return?  Well, I’ll walk, and try to keep you supplied not just with MapMyWalk routes as evidence that I’ve been walking, but with photographs of anything interesting I’ve seen.  I’d better warn you that the last picture (after the silly pub sign one) is somewhat explicit, but I’ll try to start off with innocent things, like flowers which I wasn’t sure I could identify… 

(possibly hedge woundwort?) 

(probably some kind of cranesbill?)

…and those I just don’t get tired of seeing, like green alkanet

and pineapple mayweed which really does smell like pineapples,

not to mention pretty purple grasses

and fields seemingly intentionally sown with wheat and barley together

and perhaps less intentionally with wild oats,

and a beautiful damselfly whom I couldn’t manage to photograph when she was actually flying – and then, after the mildly snigger-worthy sign, 

are you still scrolling down?

I hoped you wouldn’t be too shocked if I included some bee porn.  After all, the bees themselves didn’t seem at all embarrassed, or they wouldn’t have been doing it in the middle of the footpath.  But if you’d rather I stopped posting pictures like this, please tell me and I’ll stop.