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Across the street in Millets, it was all aimed at a far camper camper. The shop assistants were mumsy types and chatty fat lads with highlights, and while Blacks had been an ocean of khaki and frowning colours, Millets were a party of dayglo in multiple plastics. If Blacks were for gadget freaks and wannabe survivalists, Millets were unashamedly pitched at claques of lasses wanting all the gear for a totally wazzed-up weekend at some festival off the M4. Once the 40 quid Cath Kidstonesque tent had been erected, pissed and puked out of, shagged in and tripped over, it would be blearily abandoned, along with a thousand sagging compatriots, to the primordial ooze.

The Ridgeway walk, though, had been a hop from one pre-booked B&B to the next, but to do the Coast to Coast, I was notching it up a couple of gears. I’d loved the walk, the idea of the trail and the stately progress across the landscape, but I’d ended up in the B&B routine of having breakfast around eight and then being back on the path and walking from about nine. Most days, I seem to reach my destination for that evening’s stop between five and six. It was like going to the office, a proper 9 to 5, more so than my normal life has been for 20 years, and it had begun to piss me royally off. For starters, I was only ever seeing the landscape and the wildlife at exactly the same time every day, and was missing the two best bits – sunrise and sunset, when so much of the world, both this one and the ones beyond, come dazzlingly to life. For my last day’s Ridgeway walk down into Avebury, I’d asked the B&B if I could forgo the breakfast, get a packed lunch instead, and headed out of there at six, just as the sun was inching up and casting its buttery light over the dewy slopes. I saw more wildlife in those first few hours than I had throughout the previous week.

For the Coast to Coast therefore, I was going to mix it up: stay at some B&Bs, pubs and maybe the odd hotel as a treat, but also perhaps take a tent and a bivouac (bivvy) bag, so that I could camp or sleep rough as the mood took me. Neither was I going to pre-book anything except the first night’s accommodation, so that I could wing it, both in terms of daily distance travelled and even in terms of my chosen route. Freedom on the trail. I would need, therefore, a great deal more Stuff.

Mindful of the stress and expense of that pre-Ridgeway shopping crawl, I went online. Hours later, with my eyes and brain nearly bleeding, I wrenched myself away from my laptop, way more confused than I’d been beforehand. And I’d bought nothing. Instead, I’d devoured scores of angry and illiterate reviews, worried just how great was the difference between a three-star- and a four-star-rated camping mat, watched a few YouTube videos of shaven-headed Americans cooking survivalist rations in the woods and read endless autistic lists of kit posted on forums by lads called JungleWarrior and BornSurvivor (a.k.a. Kevin of South Shields and Darren of Biggleswade). In short, I’d been scared silly. Even more so by a forum dedicated solely to the Coast to Coast path, where I’d read a portentous thread that started with a warning, posted in March, that thanks to Julia Bradbury’s television series about the route that had been aired the previous year, accommodation was fast being snapped up, especially for the peak months of May, June and September. I was walking it in May, and reading this, with only the first night’s accommodation booked, just three days before setting off. Visions of limping my way across England, kipping in hedgerows like an old tramp and hanging round the bins at the back of chippies and pubs began to swim before my bloodshot eyes.

To get any idea of the place that walking holds within the modern British psyche, you have to do the Coast to Coast. Officially, it’s not The Coast to Coast, but A Coast to Coast walk, as detailed in his obsessively fastidious manner by Alfred Wainwright, the undisputed god of the rambling curmudgeon. That subtle difference between the definite and indefinite