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Showing posts from September, 2015

45 miles in 3 days with 10kg backpacks....fun!!

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Midges are horrible. Scotland is beautiful.  Walking is fun. Sepha and I got a flight up to Inverness on Friday night, scored a free lift to our hostel thanks to the lovely ladies on the Helpdesk and checked in to our night’s residence – a very odd hostel in the centre of Inverness.  To check in, you had to phone the owner, who directed me to a door with a coded padlock on it, which released two keys to get into the hostel and then our room.  I felt a bit like I was in the Crystal Maze.  We headed down to the bus station and had a breakfast of ‘tatty scones’ (so delicious, where can I get them here?), a bacon sandwich, and a peppermint slice, and got the early bus to Fort Augustus, marvelling at the views on the A82.  It was a misty morning and the clouds were low, covering the mountains either side of Loch Ness and giving it an eerie feel.  What took an hour and 15 minutes to drive, would take us three days to walk back along – yikes!  David and Cesca were

Please Sponsor Me (and Cesca and David and Sepha!)

I promise a bumper update next week but I have been SO busy it's ridiculous.  In fact I don't promise it for next week because I am away this weekend and then off to Cardiff for a hen do the following weekend, argh! Anyway this is just a quick post to say that tonight I am flying up to Inverness and tomorrow I am getting a bus down to Fort Augustus, then walking all the way back to Inverness!!! It's 45 miles over three days and I will be joining David and Cesca who are walking the 1,111 miles from Lands End to John O'Groats.  I am really excited to be joining them and hoping I don't get too bitten by the infamous midges, or gain too many blisters!  David and Cesca are raising money for Crohn's and Colitis UK, and so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and try and raise money too. If you'd like to sponsor me/them/us, you can do so by clicking on this link .  We're camping along the way, so having to carry all of our stuff and currently my bag wei

It could happen to any of us

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Last week the news was dominated by photos of Aylan Kurdi, the three year old boy who drowned when the boat he was in with his family capsized.  The images were shocking and horrific and I cried on the bus to work when I was reading the news. Images of people suffering and dying are always horrific, but I think what brought this home to most people was the fact he was so young, so helpless, and dressed in 'western style' clothing - I think one of the reasons this image was so powerful was because many people could look at that little boy and then look at their children, and think, "shit, that could be my child". It certainly kicked the newspapers into action - one example being The Daily Mail, who only six days earlier ran a front page story about "how many more migrants can we take", now featured a photo of the drowned boy face down in the sand, with the headline "The victim of a a human catastrophe". Well done Daily Mail - whatever sells pape