For 16 years, I have met up with five friends for an annual yomp in the English countryside – and we are enjoying that companionship more than ever
On the first weekend of May this year, I met up with five of my oldest male friends at Waterloo station, took a train to Milford in Surrey, walked 12 miles across Bagmoor Common and the Devil’s Punch Bowl, stopped for lunch at The Three Horseshoes in Thursley, caught the train back to London from Haslemere, drank too much beer under an awning on the South Bank and went home. At the end of the day, the step counter on my phone said 42,235.
For the past 16 years, we’ve been doing something similar roughly every year. When we inaugurated this accidental tradition, smartphones weren’t a thing, Tony Blair was still prime minister and my friends had much more hair. The first walk we did was a three-day ramble along the Coleridge Way in Somerset and north Devon. It was a fantastic route: 50 miles of moorland and rolling hills. But at the time, there was still a faint air of incredulity about what we were doing. Going walking seemed like an absurdly grown-up activity.
