David Brown - Return Journey

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It was probably the most improbable commitment two people had ever given to each other.

I was sitting with my wife Jo in the local pub lounge. It was Friday and I had only just returned home, tired and thirsty after a 250-mile drive. I needed a drink, and Jo joined me. A few short months earlier, I had started a new job as group finance director of a vibrant young company that was experiencing rapid growth. This company was based 250 miles away, and we were making preparations to move home with our two children, Steven and Iain, and our irascible sheep dog, Sherry.

I had found my old school atlas in one of our junk boxes in the loft the sort of junk that every family has, it gets carted about from one house move to another, stuffed into the loft or a cupboard or anywhere, really, as long as its out of sight and out of mind too valuable to throw away and too useless to serve any purpose. Flicking through the pages, I had found some straight lines drawn on it, which I had shown to Jo, explaining the origins. Jo had suggested I take the atlas to the pub so we could have a good laugh and a chat about what a fantasist I was and flick through some of the pages.

As the pints of beer flowed, so my nostalgia deepened. I explained to Jo in more detail what these lines had meant. In the early sixties, an eccentric peace campaigner and CND activist, Dr Barbara Moore, had captured the nations imagination with some of the feats she got up to in order to bring attention to her campaigns and causes. One of her regular habits was to walk from Lands End to John OGroats, which are the two furthest points of habitation on the British mainland.

I had become particularly attracted to this novel way of seeing Britain, and for nine months, I planned my attempt to emulate the feats of Dr Moore. However, rock climbing was my first love, and two weeks before zero hour, I aborted everything in favour of accepting a place on a rock climbing team setting off to attempt the ascent of one of Europes last great unclimbed rock faces. This in turn was aborted when, with a week to go, one of the team members, a bright light of British mountaineering, became a dim glow by falling off a bit of Welsh rock, breaking a pelvis. With two great ambitions lying dead in the street, I then opted for a six-week rock-climbing holiday in the Lake District.

Jo thought this was hilarious. Whilst I had led a very active life in my early adult years I had been a committed mountaineer and rock climber, and in my middle adult years, I had played football and drunk pints of beer standing up in recent years I had somewhat gone to seed, mellowed, as I put it. The idea of this chain-smoking, wheezing, coughing, beer swilling, and chair-bound workaholic doing anything like getting off his butt and walking a thousand miles was hilarious to say the least. Jo had not reckoned with the effects of alcohol on this discussion, though.

Davids law number 56 was tripping in. This law states that maudlin nostalgia should exponentially increase in proportion to booze consumed. As the evening wore on, I droned on with ever-increasing pathos: Always wanted to do it my last great ambition must do it before Im dead The first thing I will do when I retire, and so I droned on. Jo was also not that resistant to alcohol. By the time the landlord had a smile on his face at his unusually large takings that evening, Jo had a tear in her eye in response to the pathetically sad being sitting opposite her. Grasping my hand with undying love and devotion, she slurred words of encouragement. You will do it! I know you will! You never ever let anything beat you! She carried on, the words of encouragement got stronger; the words of undying love and devotional support got bolder. Finally, the effects of Davids law number 56 hit critical mass. When you do it, I will do it with you, she declared.

Implausibility had just been squared. Jo hated, detested, walking. It was not that she was a couch potato, far from it she led a very active lifestyle. It was just that when she was a child, her mum and dad loved walking; walked miles and miles and miles, and of course, they took poor, long-suffering Jo with them. Now the chain smoking, wheezing, coughing, beer-swilling, sedentary workaholic was about to be joined in a commitment to pop off for a thousand-mile stroll by someone who hated and detested the thought of recreationally walking anywhere. There was only one redeeming feature to this farce. It was not to happen until I retired, a comfortable 25 years at least into the future plenty of time for reality and common sense to intervene before anything drastic happened.

Of course, it did not stop us planning it. I quite enjoyed this diversionary foray into fantasy-land. I bought a complete set of ordnance survey maps, pored over the tiniest detail and worked out thousands of different routes in the minutest of detail. Jo even joined in, bringing me cups of tea as I laboured away and enthusiastically pronouncing on what a superb achievement it would be for us both, assuming nothing was to intervene in the next quarter of a century or so to derail our plans.

Disaster, though, was only just around the corner. Something was going to intervene; something that would firmly put money, or feet, where our mouths had been.

About the same time as we had sat in the local pub, making great declarations of improbable commitment for a quarter of a centurys time, I started to be bothered with a pain in my left eye. At first, I thought it was due to a blocked tear duct, but fifteen gallons of eye wash later and I was beginning to doubt my self-diagnosis. As the frequency and severity of the pain increased, I realized that really, it was a sinus problem. I became a well-known customer at a popular chain store chemist. I almost became addicted to nasal sprays. I was eating tablets for sinus problems at a faster rate than they could be made. The atmosphere both at home and in the office began to resemble a tropical rainforest, as I resorted to humidifiers and inhalations.

None of these self-cures worked. The attacks of pain increased to as many as six a day. With very little warning, ten minutes at most, I would find myself on the floor, screaming in agony as the nerves behind my eye and down my face felt as though they were on fire. It was often accompanied by vertigo and muscle weakness. For anything up to two hours at a time, I was totally disabled by the most unimaginable pain penetrating every single nerve ending on one side of my face. At this point, I was leading some very delicate complex negotiations to buy out our biggest competitor, and my colleagues were becoming increasingly disturbed at the sight of me rolling on the floor at the most inconvenient moments. Somehow they felt concerned at the possibility that whenever the bank manager or a shareholder asked a question about the companys profits or finances, the finance director might fall to the floor screaming and banging his head. A difficult interview with the company chairman resulted in him telling me in the kindest possible way that when the negotiations finished, I should get the problem sorted before the problem sorted me.

I have always been reluctant to visit doctors, but enough was enough. Two years after those first discussions with Jo in the Kings Head, I was with the consultant neurologist at my local hospital. I was invited to stay for a few days for tests. Tests meant putting my head in a huge magnet (brain scan), having my nose squashed flat against X-ray machines (sinus X-rays), having my eyes poked out (pressure tests for glaucoma), being strapped to a board and swung around in a room (inner ear tests), having bright lights shone in my eyes (test for other brain diseases), taking pills that made me sick, pills that stopped me being sick but caused constipation, pills to make me go, pills to make me come back. I was eventually discharged for long enough to be given a chance to recover my health before round two, the conclusive interview with the consultant.