You’ll have to come along on my trip into self-pity I am afraid. It will help you to make sense of what happened to me later.

I had crossed a border, from the intimate to the unknown and I was finally heading towards an adventure walking into the unlikely excitements of cultured Cambridgeshire.

Not that Cambridgeshire the next morning looked much different from Bedfordshire. The same sprouting wheat, the same modern houses. The same cars, the same roads, the same absence of people. The same footpaths, except now the signposts picked out the Clopton Way. There were a fewer hedgerows, I suppose, as I made my way east, but by and large, the unfamiliar by-ways to Cambridge looked rather familiar.

The injury I had done to my foot was making walking uncomfortable. Pauline’s mum had worked a miracle overnight by providing an ice pack for my foot but it started to hurt again after a mile of walking. I had aches and pains to add to my blisters and I mooched that morning head down wrapped up into myself. Just to add to the fun it started raining.

Walking on your own for days at a time is a great way to get to know your own eccentricities, those odd mannerisms that the policing of other people usually keep in check. It was only my fourth day of walking but already my first crop of weirdnesses were starting to sprout, the little murmurings of madness which three months later would become raving insanity. When I really lost the plot and was used to my own company I took to dancing, to voodoo, and to chanting place names and to circling the map when I got lost. I also took to spontaneous song when I was happy, belting out my joy for all the world to hear. But for the moment I was in pain and I stuck to flinging out a monotonous note as I walked.

"Ff..Ff..Ff!" I repeated endlessly.The fuzz box effect of my breath passing through front teeth endlessly formed the first syllable of the world’s most flexible word.

My physical discomfort was not my only problem. I was going through a sort of mental withdrawal. I was leaving my past. I was evaporating. I remember stopping that morning mid-field and looking around me with some disgust. I was on my own. I hurt and missed having someone to talk to.

Before, my whole life had been created out of conversation, a veritable splattering of speech marks, of dialogue. I had lived life inside a radio play as the typical city trader’s job is to talk for a living.

I’m firm at One Fifty
I’ll take ten thousand
Of course not all of these interchanges were verbal. At night I used to dream in green from the news stories that flashed across my desk’s screens. The prices from New York. The Reuters headlines. The fax, the photocopier, the coffee machine. Everything in the office seemed to be talking to me. Everything seemed to be capable of saying something important. I even regarded the mobile phone as a means of communication.

I had in-trays full of messages. Faxes for the friendly ones, telexes for the officious, and e-mail from those who had figured out how it worked. The computers that were supposed to assist in this process were piled up on my desk like the Manhatten skyline. I really got used to conversation.

And now I had made it stop.

It’s an irony that all these years I had been flying to the ends of the Earth to get away from it all when I could have come to Cambridgeshire to achieve the same result.

At Arrington the Clopton Way became the Wimpole Way and I strode out across parkland towards Wimpole Hall past the Hall’s impressive collection of curious-looking cows.

I have a real love-hate feeling for the great mansions, the palaces of England. I found that all summer when I strode up the approach to a great house or hall that I instantly became little Lord Fauntleroy; an aristocrat riding in an imaginary carriage. Then for about five minutes after my initial approach I became a horrendous architectural snob. Oh look, it’s Palladian...it’s Elizabethan....! I would find myself marvelling at the scope and splendour of the architecture and the landscaping. This warm fuzzy feeling, however, was always disturbed by a ‘private keep out’ notice or by some officious bod telling me that I could not do what I was doing. I found that my daydreams about being a member of the landed gentry were then replaced by the voice of my down-trodden forebears who would whisper in my ear - let’s burn the place to the ground!

It stopped raining as I walked across the fields of the farm beyond Wimpole Hall. Suddenly the world took on a rosier hue. A skylark flew up from almost under my feet and gave me a burst of song as it flapped along in front of me. Its voice drew me on, up over a hill, further and further from its precious nest. I must have walked for almost mile following it across the sky. When I finally looked around me I was surprised to find that I had climbed up over a small ridge and spread out in front of me on the lower ground beyond Little Eversdon were the telescopes of the University of Cambridge. These ultra-modern metal structures struck me as being extremely beautiful at that moment. They looked like sculptures with their pure lines and curving bowls.

Despite my whining, there were good moments in the early days of the walk as I crossed the south-east. One particularly fine moment came just after the village of Haslingfield where the path took me out alongside the diminutive river Cam through willow-filled water meadows. The sun suddenly appeared and I felt like I stepped into the set of a Flake advert. I was surrounded by wavy grass and rippling reflections. Where was the woman in the blowing cotton dress, I wondered.

Originally in my dream walk I had imagined myself walking right into the City of Cambridge. I had an idea of myself sitting down by the Backs and taking in a view of colleges by the water. Perhaps when the dream was running particularly well I would even take a punt (or at least I would be offered a ride around the water by a willing student). As it turned out however I had been offered a bed for the night in Great Shelford to the south of the City and so at this point I turned due east promising myself that I would walk into Cambridge that evening. It was one of the few promises that I made on the walk that I did not keep. By the time I had got to Great Shelford I was hobbling as both of my feet had swollen like ripening marrows. I was happy to sit, to take tea and talk about my nice old life buying and selling oil. Nuts, I thought, to the fair City of Cambridge.

Next morning I found myself walking south-east heading in a direction that would take me eventually to Colchester. Cambridgeshire rolls a bit here south of the Fens, and I was headed for the ridge on the top of which an old Roman road runs all the way to Essex.

Roman roads are straight. They are famous for it. So it would be a bit churlish to complain about lack of corners on this by-road clearly marked as Roman by the Ordinance Survey. However the map does not give you warning of the effect of hours of walking without a single bend caught between two eight foot hedges. I felt like I was walking down the inside of a gutter that morning. The weather was terrible and I squelched as I battled on into the driving rain. I found I had nothing to do or see so I found myself experimenting with words to describe the downpour. Blattering seemed like a good verb I thought, but it did not convey the wicked whip with which the wind was driving the rain up into my face. After two hours of getting wet I decided flogging was probably the word I was looking for.

I reached Haverhill much quicker than I intended that afternoon and found myself with time in the town centre to dry out and to have a look around. Haverhill had, to me, the familiar feel of a New Town built up from London overspill in the post-war period. The accent of its people was like Hemel, Harlow or Leighton Buzzard and I watched Del Boy and Rodney operate a sale from out of a suit case. With its Woolworth’s and Wimpey’s Haverhill High Street felt like home. I sat in a cafe drinking hot chocolate blending in easily with my fellow Mockneys. It felt like I had not gone anywhere.

I don’t want to record the next day of the walk. As I write now I am resisting the urge to cop out and state baldly Day 6 - I walked from Haverhill to Colchester. My memory has hidden this particular day like an institutionalised relative that is too embarrassing to be allowed the light of day.

It is easy for the present me to be smug. The me that has got round the country can look back on the poor soul slogging across in Essex and say - what a sad sod - has he got no idea?

The truth was that I hadn’t. I thought walking was all about maps, and boots, and places of interest and getting from A to B on time. I thought that it was all about photographs and good books like Hoskins.

I hadn’t yet lightened my load. I needed to jettison the weight of expectations I had of myself, of England. I was weighed down and sinking in the mud. I brought a way of life with me that just was not necessary. Consider my one word entry in my diary this morning:

‘Late’. An attitude I had brought with me from my commuter days. A desperate unhappiness of the soul that wants to be in two places at once. Office or home. Office or home - the rhythm of the commuter trains wheels tell you that you have no use for the journey in between. I was late. I had no use for the journey.

It was an unpromising start in Haverhill. I was simply knackered. I hacked around over mud churned up by the wheels of a huge off-road vehicle, looking for the path on the map amongst the mess of a half finished by- pass. I looked for the footpath, but what I saw was more like the Somme; mud filled trenches, the ripped remains of trees and twisted metal all over the place. I found the sign for the path face down in a ditch like a drowned drunk. The footpath was dead. Long live the road.

Things were not much better once I found the footpath. One farmer in particular had made it his duty to plough up every last trace of the paths in his fields. I slipped and tripped my way through the newly ploughed ridges and compacted about twenty pounds of mud on to the bottom of my boots. I was forced to walk like a ploughman, one foot on the level, one foot in the furrow. A pelvis twisting position which in the days of horse-drawn ploughs the ploughman used to maintain for ten miles or more a day. After walking the margins of just two fields I felt twisted and out of shape. By the time I reached Great Yeldham I was starting to fume.

I was late. The mud held me back. Everything this morning seemed to make me angry. My mood was spiralling inwards like a wayward comet. I was in an orbit that would take me crashing into the sun. I simply wanted to give up, with a cast iron alibi for getting out of the walk. Bad foot, you see. I was tempted to start putting on a limp. Its amazing how a bit of pain takes the fun out of anything.

I didn’t stop though. Instead I struggled on and like Dante entered a lower circle of hell. I began that most horrible of tortures. I became acquainted with myself.

What I should have done was to realise that I could stop and then carry on. If I had just relaxed a little I would have been fine. England would still be there the next day for me. But at the time I thought of a two thousand mile walk was a test, a feat of endurance and so I endured (and endured) and got ever more miserable.

You can take the man out of the office but you can not take office out of the man. I was trying to walk to a timetable. As I marched on I barely took in the details of where I was. I did not take a single photograph while I was in Essex . Even now I have trouble bringing to mind an image of the landscape. I was walking with my head down and saw more of my feet than the towns and villages of the Colne Valley. What I saw at my feet depressed me.

I saw lighter fuel canisters. I saw plastic bags with the mess of glue inside and I saw a couple of kids sitting on a dumped sofa drinking from a bottle. It seemed that footpaths were places to go and get hammered, putting a whole new slant on 'getting away from it all in the country'.

I had been hurrying, a state of mind which did not allow me to listen to my legs. When I stubbed my toes I carried on saying to myself I had to be at Colchester at 7 o’clock. Then a sharp shock ripped through the front of my right shin and I fell down.

I felt horribly humiliated. Not to be beaten by the bulk of the Pennines, the Lakes District or the switch back of the cliffs of Cornwall. I had failed on the very first lap trotting through a flat field in Essex. I hobbled along the path until I reached the pub at Fordstreet and then I lay down in the field at the back of the pub and cried.

The longest stretch of my whole walk was the slow hobble onto West Bergholt near Colchester. Reaching a pub there, I admitted that the daylight was going and rang Pauline to come and pick me up.

I felt like my plans had frozen and shattered on the floor. I had only walked as far as Essex. Nothing could feel more ridiculous.

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