Be careful what you wish for.
We have been on our walk.
The walk was planned with some other old people who were all in my class at school. The idea was that we would all get fitter and not die soon of fat-and-lazy related diseases, which is an ever-present danger in my case.
This shows how much I have changed since I was at school, when I would never, ever, ever have voluntarily gone on a thirteen mile walk no matter what the promised health benefits, which also goes to show that you do not necessarily get wiser with age.
Because of working and sleeping late we didn’t arrive until the middle of the day, so instead of walking twenty six miles we only walked thirteen.
I think I am going to collapse.
We did not dive out of bed with any great enthusiasm this morning, because we had actually only managed five hours sleep in the end, and it was not easy to feel excited about anything under those circumstances.
We felt better after the second coffee, and eventually set off, having loaded hats and coats and everything else we could possibly think of into the car, and left the children with a long list of anxieties and promises that they would look after themselves and one another and the dogs, and not forget to go to work or put wood on the fire, which they listened to with astounding lack of interest.
We were about half an hour away from home when Number Two Daughter sent me a text telling me they had burnt the house down, presumably by way of reassurance.
We met everybody at a pub where they were having a self-congratulatory lunch, having already walked for miles and miles, and we set off behind them into the hills.
It is a bleak sort of place, occupied only by sheep and the least sociable sort of farmers, and we trekked through mud and little streams and over stiles and through puddles full of frogspawn, until we got tired.
The thing was that we kept on walking even after we had got tired.
It was a remarkably nice day, cool and dry and cloudy enough not to be hot.
We walked on and on.
By the time we got to some of the bigger hills I was puffing and panting quite a lot, and my feet were beginning to regret the absence of slippers.
We walked and walked.
After a while my legs began to ache as well as my feet, and I became aware of terrible stabbing pains in my heels.
I took my boots off when we stopped, as it happens at the top of an enormous mountain, expecting that they would be full of blood and bits of grated skin, but they weren’t. There was a small pink patch on the back of my heel.
We walked on and on.
My legs and my feet hurt and I knew I had worn my joints down so badly that I would need a hip replacement five years sooner. I listened to snatches of conversations around me, because of not having any spare breath to talk myself, which encouraged me to keep up because of not wanting to miss anything.
By the end of the walk it was becoming dusk. Somebody very kindly gave us a lift to collect our car, and I collapsed groaning into the passenger seat.
Mark drove, which was terribly brave, because he had walked the whole way with his sore-tendon knee.
We all went for a celebratory pizza together afterwards, which was nice. I do like being together with those people, because they are my contemporaries and have already seen me at my most confused and hopeless, so I do not need to pretend to be a natural sophisticate or an incisive wit, because they all know perfectly well that I am not. They have got plenty memories of me when I was fourteen and incapable of understanding calculus and with hormonal grease oozing from my teenage pores.
Eventually we had to leave quite early because I had had a large glass of red wine and was starting to fall asleep.
We stopped at a service station because I needed to go in for a wee.
My legs seemed to have lost their capacity to perform any useful function. I could barely get out of the car and stagger to the door.
I am not at all sure that this was a good idea.
I am not looking forward to the morning.
