The bestselling author has always hated being on his own, so why does he spend a few days every year hiking alone in the wind and rain? Just don’t call it a midlife crisis …
The first long solitary walk was 10 years ago. On occasional visits to Edinburgh, I’d always been taken by that beautiful stretch north of Newcastle, where the North Sea sidles up and the train seems to skirt the cliff edge, travellers looking up from books and phones, and crossing the carriage aisle to take in the view. The estuary, the town and the beach – it always seemed as if the passengers wanted the train to slow, then stop, so that we might clamber down and walk to the shore. Perhaps not all the passengers, but I certainly did and there seemed to be no reason why this couldn’t be achieved. I looked up the spot on the map, bought a guidebook to the Northumberland Coast Path, measured out distances and put aside four days. I bought new boots and socks, Ordnance Survey maps and an unnecessary compass, because how do you get lost on a coast walk? I bought roll-up waterproofs and dense, futuristic protein bars and too many novels, and on a bright, sharp day in the early summer of 2014, set out, catching the first departure from London to Newcastle, changing for Alnmouth, walking to the shore, then turning left and heading towards Berwick.
It sounds, I realise, like a textbook reaction to middle age, with that obsessive and eccentric quality, a need to achieve something measurable and definable. As midlife missions go, it wasn’t even that impressive or ambitious, hardly the Camino de Santiago or Everest; walking, not running, an almost marathon. Neither was this some new-discovered passion. I’ve been going on long walks for most of my adult life and my children have happy and less-than-happy memories of hikes across fells and moors in rain and snow. The only features that marked out this journey were the distance and the solitude. I had never walked so far nor spent so much time alone. This was new.
