So here we are, six moons or so later and though many miles closer on our path around the sun than we were in the Summer we northerners are now leaning further away from the sun and spending so much more time lurking in total darkness and never far enough up from sunrise or sunset to burn off the mists and gloom.
Covid too is plunging us back into a dark gloomy place with the Omicron variant just taking off and criss-crossing the globe.
I had COVID with relatively mild symptoms but it still wiped me out for the worst part of two weeks. It may have been Omicron or good old Delta I don’t know but that vaccine I had back in May probably helped me fight it off.
As I suffered my ten day isolation my thoughts turned to the more satisfying challenge of the Summer and how we sat outside for lunch to avoid contamination. Our afternoon leg took us across the bed of the Little Hadham bypass just before they laid the tarmac so perhaps our prints are fossilised in the thin layer of dirt left by the glaciers between the speeding cars and the two hundred metres of chalk below. All other traces of the steps we took less than 100 days ago will have been washed by the rain, turned by the plough or covered with decaying autumn leaves by now.
My memories of the long day are fading too. I recall the slow slog up the the side of wet chalky clay fields to join the course of an old roman road that took the direct and demanding route over the top of the hills like us rather than the lazy meander along the river valleys that other routes took.
Perhaps my favourite encounter on the day was of a young family strolling with their children. When they heard that we had walked from London they asked how many days and where we had stayed over. Judging by the disbelief in their young daughter’s voice when she heard we had walked all the way that very same day perhaps she will be inspired by our challenge to stretch her own horizons beyond what seems possible to achieve something extraordinary.
This encounters like others on the way kept us motivated as we slogged on up the gentle slope to Strethall perched at the top of the chalk scarp and looked down across the flat lands to Cambridge and beyond across the fens as far as our eyes could see as the light started to fail and a welcome party joined us and guided us to sugary refreshment and sustenance in the Plough at Duxford before we continued to complete the last few miles in the dark. Finally reaching our Cambridge home where I lay down on my soft bed, exhausted to my bones, to be swept away into the deep by the tidal wave of sleep that I had vainly held back for nearly two whole spins of our green, white and blue ball.
To sleep perchance to dream that in some small way all our efforts each day have done more good than harm.