The Long Route

"You’re walking like you’re expecting a performance review," Ewan says.

I look down at my boots, planted firmly on the scree of the Alta Via 1, and then up at him. We are standing on the fork in the trail, the point where our walking group has fractured into the sensible and the masochistic. The others, clutching their water bottles like security blankets, have descended into the gentle, sun-drenched valley path. Ewan and I, by the sheer accident of standing at the back of the pack while discussing the merits of local cheese, have been consigned to the long route: a steep, exposed ridge walk that promises vistas and blisters in equal measure.

It is Day Two. Yesterday, we were polite colleagues, nodding at breakfast over mugs of espresso, bound only by the fact that we both work for the same logistics firm in Leeds, though he is in Operations and I am in Accounts, and our departments have a long, quiet history of blaming each other for delays.