His goal was to walk from London to Edinburgh, but just getting to Redhill proved challenging

Hit me, shoot me, someone injure me, so that I cannot do this any more, but won’t be seen as giving up.”

My thoughts of harming myself to escape the pain I was feeling provided me with some worry for what lay ahead; it was the first day.

How could I walk to Edinburgh if I had struggled to reach the grand suburbia of Redhill? Surely, I had created a delusional fantasy that could not be realised. A fantasy that was self-inflicted. The pain was to be of my own making because I was the tw*t who had committed to walking the length of the UK.

Hours later, as I lay in my tent, full of Uncle Ben’s finest rice and fluffy pancakes provided by the local vicar’s wife (I’ll get to that), I realised that I could do it. I knew it was going to be hard and painful but I just needed to bear with it and the reward would come. That was the first of many times that I had to fight my natural urge to jump on a train home and curl up in my bed until no one remembered what my gap year consisted of. But of course it wasn’t going to be easy.

More importantly, could it be enjoyable? I am not someone who simply wishes to inflict pain upon themselves in the name of “endurance”. I am someone who wanted to escape from the city, enjoy the countryside, and have weird quirky experiences along the way. Fun, with all its childish connotations, was essential.

... So, here we go. Tuesday 9 February, 6am. Awake, showered, up and ready, I set off out of the door. Twenty miles to walk. Sixty miles in three days. Victoria station to Brighton station. Railway style. First decision: podcast, music, or nothing? I chose all three. Might as well experiment to find out what works best.

Podcasts are good as long as you enjoy the podcast and are not pissed off by the pretentious sound of the voice in your ears. I’m sorry Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall but I could not listen to you describe how food shapes our lives in this sort of fake “radio voice”. I don’t know how else to describe it – the voice where the speaker seems to be attempting to put emotions behind the lines they speak without actually feeling any such emotions. I’m guilty of it. I think pretty much everyone is. It’s basically like Coldplay’s music, trying so hard to be emotional that any emotions they had in the first place have disappeared from the record.

That takes us into music. This is a difficult one. On the one hand, you want to listen to atmospheric music connecting you with the land around you. But on the other, you want to shut out the pain, forget what you are doing and engage just with the music itself. Only upbeat or dance tracks can truly do that for me.

Then there is the devilish option of no music and no podcasts. Nothing to protect my ears from the world around me! From the whistling wind ferociously smacking my ear to the gentle hum of traffic in the distance, reminding you that it is England and there is little chance of a complete escape from civilisation.

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Having no music scared me; the idea of having nothing to block out the pain of my backpack crushing my collarbone or my ankles slowly disintegrating into the ground below was frightening. I would succumb to the pain and therefore not be able to fight through the wall ahead of me. None of this was really the case of course: but unfortunately the fears embedded in me meant I didn’t find out until later that walking without music actually creates opportunities for the uplifting experience of meeting and chatting to other people which I had craved.

Walking out of London, as I did on that first morning, has its benefits and drawbacks.

Benefit: you see all walks of life going through their daily routines, which has the added advantage of providing more interesting photographs. A photo with an individual to focus on always offers a little more intrigue than an empty landscape.

Drawback: the landscape isn’t anywhere near as beautiful as the countryside when the main roads exiting London are just that, main roads, so are chock-a-block with cars and empty of character. Meaning that even with the individuals dominating the picture you do not get the beautiful landscape to accompany it.

That being said, the principal pain is the fact that these main roads are never-bloody-ending. Walking down the same road for over two hours creates slight psychological problems. You feel as if you are making no progress and become paranoid about the time you are taking, questioning whether you will make it to your target before nightfall.

I didn’t. Night was indeed falling as I crossed the M25 – on a bridge of course, not playing a literal version of the video game Sheepish. Although walking along an A road with no pavements, and with multiple cars speeding past me every few seconds with the accompanying sounds of beeping horns, felt almost as horrible as I imagine actually crossing the M25 would be.

Google Maps had screwed me over. I do understand that I was an idiot for relying on Google Maps for walking directions; every experienced hiker is probably hysterically laughing, reading this. Ordnance Survey (OS) maps were also in my travelling bag so I was not the completely pathetic inexperienced hiker that you are imagining. But, of course, neither could inform me that such a road had no pavement to accompany it as it exited the metropolis of London into the detached-house suburbia of Reigate.

I have slightly skipped over my quite dramatic psychological breakdowns.

My mind was not in the right place by 2.30pm on 9 February 2016. I wasn’t sure if it was the overall lack of food I’d consumed as I attempted to follow the internet-provided idea of just intensely snacking throughout the day, or the sheer distance I’d covered as I trekked up another hill after already surpassing the 20 miles I had expected to do that day.

Tears suddenly began to gush out of my eyes. The mud below me would explode into the air as my feet ferociously beat it to a pulp in frustration. The trees on either side didn’t escape the beating either; my hands grabbed the nearest stick and began to assault these beings with what was basically one of their own limbs. Next they would be pounded by a set of impressive insults, such as ‘You stupid f**king bugger tw*t!’, which I feel were probably more aimed at myself than at the innocent “bystanders” around me.

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I did slightly calm down. But the final five miles of the day were then mainly dominated by phone conversations which I couldn’t sustain because of my tendency to burst into tears or yelps of agony. My mum and Flo would be the grateful recipients of these delightful phone calls.

Flo’s one of my best mates, by the way, and even though she’s experienced me at my worst we still haven’t really spoken about those phone calls since. My attempts to quell such psychological torture by devouring a whole box of Jaffa Cakes failed miserably. So I wouldn’t say I have the fondest memories of those few hours stumbling through the spitting rain to crawl into the vicarage. My arrival felt more like a relief than a celebration.

I should probably explain why I was camping in the garden of a vicarage in Redhill.

It is not because I am a great believer in God – I am not – or a sinful man wanting to repent for his devilish actions – again, I am not. It is because of my mum. She had panicked at the fact that I had not found a wilderness to nestle my tent into and so had contacted a local vicar after her desperate call to arms on Facebook had failed. He, like I assume many vicars would, graciously agreed to offer an intrepid teenager his back garden to sleep in.

John and his lovely wife greeted the muddy imbecile in front of them with open arms. I stripped off my layers of waterproofs, which were really to protect my actual clothes from mud rather than to shield them from rainwater, and collapsed onto their sofa while cradling the hot cup of tea John’s wife had made me. We sat talking about the oddity of living in a house that has been assigned to you because of your contract with the church – the idea still baffles me.

It was a very nice house in actual fact and had a delightful shower to complete the perfect package. I did not expect a shower but jumped at the chance when I was offered it. When you are walking nonstop all day, and smell like an elephant has shat you out, politeness goes out of the window and you leap at any opportunity to wash or to receive a proper meal. It is also, of course, a service to your hosts.

After receiving the delectable gift of pancakes covered in sugar, cream, lemon, chocolate spread and every other topping (it was Shrove Tuesday), I headed off into my minuscule tent for the night. I would be greeted by my camera goading me to ashamedly record a “vlog”, my pedometer informing me that one wrong turn had resulted in my walking 25 miles not 20 and my notepad tempting me to spill my psychological torments onto its speckle-covered pages. I slept with the uplifting words “’Ope I don’t collapse tomorrow” ingrained into my diary.

Sleep was the one thing that came surprisingly easily. Exhaustion created by a day’s walking led to deep sleep so joyful that you could only wish for it at home. There was the occasional stirring outside, perhaps a fox sniffing at the unrecognisable material in front of them, though on this first evening probably the vicar’s dog. But apart from that it was a sleep more comfortable than the many drink-aided ones I have experienced in a tent at Glastonbury. Bedtime was also slightly earlier than at Glastonbury; it would be 10pm at the latest. I did not attempt that night or any other to compound my exhaustion by staying up later; succumbing to it felt much more satisfactory.

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However, there was the slight downside of having to wake up before 7am almost every day. Not the best feeling. At first, I said to myself that this would only be when I was wild camping because my camp would need to disintegrate into mid-air before the sunlight shone its torch on my whereabouts, enabling farmers to chase and shoot my skinny arse off their land. (I don’t think all farmers are trigger-happy people living in the Middle Ages. Only some.)

Actually, I had to wake that early because walking 20 miles took rather longer than I, or Google Maps, had predicted. I didn’t wish to be walking late into the evening down country lanes in the pitch black and freezing cold, so waking up earlier seemed like a good solution to that problem. It wasn’t. But that was all for later; at this point the challenge was just to reach Brighton. This seemed to me a kind of watershed before I would consider any implications for my future walks.

Setting off again in the morning from the Redhill vicarage I realised that it already felt like a week had passed since I had tentatively stepped out of my house the day before. Days feel like weeks when you are putting yourself through the self-subscribed torture of hiking with what feels like a donkey latched to your back.

Day two would be easier, I told myself. I was now in the open, expansive countryside that I had dreamt of, with a network of footpaths and tiny roads leading me to Brighton. It was easier. It was mainly because I walked 19 or perhaps 20 miles instead of the 25 I had done the day before. But the countryside helped.

There are the occasional moments where you look at your surroundings and realise how much beauty surrounds you. Like the woods, on the outskirts of Crawley, where I decided to cook up a good old bag of Ainsley Harriot’s cous cous. I sat, perched on a log, staring straight ahead at the deserted forest in front of me, admiring the grandeur of the trees soaring dozens of feet into the air above my head.

“Deserted” is, in fact, in large part a description of the entirety of my walks. The footpaths which my boots tramped were largely devoid of other human beings. Mainly due to the fact that it was February and the temperature struggled to get above 5C let alone to double digits. The rest of the population had realised what I hadn’t, that it isn’t the most fun thing to walk in near-freezing temperatures. Anyway, I trotted away from the spot where I had devoured Ainsley’s cous cous, and on to the river. Which I would then gracefully fall into.

And it was quite graceful, if I’m honest. I managed to limit the expletives to ‘F***!’ and ‘S***’, which I feel is pretty impressive when your feet are sodden to the point where every step is accompanied by a tantalising squelch.

I had made the clever decision to ditch the footpath which had served me so well for the last couple of miles. On first look, it appeared to have actually paid off as I strode through the woods unopposed by obstacles. But then it became clear why neither that footpath nor any others had marched through the same route. A river. Well, I call it a river, but it was basically somewhere on the spectrum between a river and a stream. Not quite small enough to jump across but not quite big enough to justify the grand definition of “river”.

I mean, I have quite strong opinions on the classification of rivers and streams, as if you couldn’t tell…

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So, on to the whimpering fool standing in wading-deep water, keeping the classification neutral so as not to offend. A plank of wood seemed to quieten my frustration. Well, at least until I saw it up close: the burgeoning algae in the rotten middle were not promising me a dream of triumphantly crossing the water. But with no other options, I decided to attempt the impossible: I would indeed try to cross the water in front of me with the aid of this plank of wood.

It probably wasn’t the greatest idea to carry my donkey-weighted backpack and camera bag on board for a mission which would surely impress the great Philippe Petit. I could feel Philippe’s disappointment as the wood bowed to the pressure and quenched its long-held thirst, taking me with it. With the agility of Jason Bourne and the wit of Stephen Merchant, I threw my camera bag up into the air and over to the safety of the bank in front of me, and probably looked more like a horse stuck in a hole than something from a James Bond sequence.

I survived! The grand 15 inches of water had not taken me along its current; I had warded off the strong forces of nature and survived! You can probably tell such adventure and excitement weren’t generally the main features of my walks.

Gabriel’s book, ‘I Went For a Walk’ is published by Unbound and is also available from Amazon

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