Day Five – Beinn Dorain (3,530ft, 1,076m), Beinn An Dothaidh (3,287 ft, 1,002m) More rain. Can you spot a pattern, dear reader? So we sped over to the western highlands and bagged a couple of munros near Bridge of Orchy, close to our rendezvous with Bruce. I actually quite enjoyed myself, but don’t tell anybody…    

Day Three – Beinn A’Chaorainn (3,550ft / 1,082m), Beinn Bhreac (3,054ft / 931m). On which it rained a lot. Lots of walking across boggy marshy stuff sprinkled with deer and sheep crap. Another metaphor for life, then. I’ve never been so glad to see Richard’s Volvo, and I’ve don’t remember ever doing anything so exhausting. Thankfully we’d already decided that Thursday would be a rest day. ...

Day Two – Carn A’Mhaim (3,402ft / 1,037m), Ben Macdui (4,295ft / 1,309m). I’m really not fit enough for this lark. As Rich later said, “Nel has invented a pace between stop and walk.” But at least I give it a go and get away from the PC once in a while. Can’t get much further away from it than Ben Macdui – just a shame we didn’t reach the summit until almost dusk. Oopsy. By the time we got to the bothy it was pitch darkness, and the bothy was full of people who showed no intentions of squeezing up. So after some chicken soup and bread (supplementing the two Mars Bars we had already eaten that day – bloaters or what?) we got into sleeping bags and survival bags for a rather damp night’s sleep. The first time I’ve ever worn a woolley hat while sleeping, and hopefully the last. Oh well, at least it didn’t rain. ...

Does anybody else think Savage Garden sound like Spandau Ballet? Sorry, just had to get that off my chest… Day one of the holiday proper, then. Irn Bru and Double BK Cheeseburger for breakfast, a quick jaunt into the city, and then we’re off. We didn’t reach the highlands until the afternoon, so decided just to bag a few teeny munros which are adjacent to a 2,000ft high road! Namely Carn Aosda (3,008ft / 917m), Carn A’Gheoidh (3,199ft / 975m) and The Cairnwell (3,061ft / 933m). ...

Travelling Northwards on a weekday when others are working is a wonderfully liberating feeling, especially when you’re heading for Scotland. This time I was almost glad to see the signal lights on my mobile phone quietly extinguish. The journey was pretty good – we hadn’t seen Bruce for about a year, as he’d been off seeing the world for the past nine months. This gave us the opportunity to fill him in on nine months of pop culture, which seemed to boil down to: ...

My second Munro. Lots of fun in the snow.

Good Friday, 10th April 1998. While the Good Friday Agreement was being signed in Belfast, I was reluctantly plodding up my first ever Munro, the dreary featureless lump that is Meall a’Chrasgaidh. Only the view across to the mighty An Teallach served to convince me that it was perhaps worth giving this hillwalking lark another try. ...