Introducing...

It's my birthday this weekend, so I thought I'd take a self-indulgent opportunity to introduce to you the silent contributor to this blog.

I was my dad's fourth child, born rather late in his life and quite some time after the previous three - I was his 50th birthday present. I was lucky to be able to spend a lot of time with him, when he was a work-from-home architect and later when he retired, and many happy hours were spent sitting at the kitchen table discussing anything and everything. We shared a love of strong tea to keep us going through the late night chats.

This walk is one of those hair-brained ideas that one of us would have had at 1am, only to discard it as ridiculous by the morning.* Now that he's not here, I feel as though I can't dismiss these schemes quite so readily. Maybe that's why I'm actually going through with one of them...

---
* We once spent a good couple of hours discussing the practicalities of cycling the end-to-end on a tandem during one of these talks - even down to who would be at the front and who at the back and whether we'd camp or use B&Bs. Luckily for both of us it was vetoed over breakfast.