It’s the summer solstice, I have a rare day off work, and I’m planning on going for a long walk. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been on plenty of walks as a family, regardless of conditions, just to get out of the house when there has been little else to do. Some have been unpleasant but, no matter how cold, wet or pointless some of these walks were they can’t come close to the 5 most joyless trudges of my life

1. Leeds, 1997

I was a teenager at this time, attending a house party in North West Leeds. As a teenager, I had no social skills, and at parties I tended to not talk to anyone, get progressively drunker and more miserable, then walk home without telling anyone I was leaving (including, on one memorable occasion, without my shoes after vomiting all over the hosts kitchen)

The parties were usually at a nearby friend’s house, so the walk home was at least quite short. However on this occasion, I was probably about 45 minutes walk from home by the fastest route. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the fastest route, and was too embarrassed to ask anyone.

The journey got off to an inauspicious start when I couldn’t figure out how to open the gate of the house of the party I was leaving, and had to climb inelegantly over it. I then figured that if I got to the main road and followed it East, I would eventually reach Leeds City centre. I did, but it took me probably an hour. I was cold, I was miserable and maudlin in the way only a drunken teenager can be, with every step reminding of what an idiot I was.

I at least had managed to go in the right direction, made it to Leeds City centre, and then from there walked another 45 minutes home, an hour later than if I’d walked the correct way, and probably no quicker than if I’d just stayed at the party and got a taxi home with my friends. A joyless trudge entirely of my own stupid teenage making this one.

2. Glastonbury, 1997

My first Glastonbury festival, and neither me nor any of my friends knew what we were doing. One thing any experienced Glastonbury goer knows is that to get anywhere decent to camp, you arrive as early as possible on the Wednesday morning. We were getting there on the Thursday evening.

We were dropped of by a coach at a point which turned out to be a very, long way away from the actual campsite, and at the bottom of a very steep hill. We trudged up said hill with our heavy backpacks and tents, wishing we had packed more lightly. At the top of the hill, close to the actual entrance to the festival, a group of Christians were giving out free water and juice, and I was so grateful that I came closer than I ever have in my life to finding religion.

We got inside the actual festival site, and realised we had no idea where was a good place to camp. Every patch of grass seemed to be already taken up by tents, and we wandered aimlessly trying to find somewhere to pitch. It was one of the muddy years, and raining intermittently, and as we trudged we got wetter and muddier, and more miserable.

Eventually we found just enough space to squeeze our tents in, and did our best to set up properly in the fading light. By the time we managed this, I was cold and miserable, it was muddy, dark and everything smelt of cow shit. I had no desire to explore the festival. I got straight into my sleeping bag and tried to sleep while listening to drunken neighbouring campers sing Jonathan Fire Eater songs.

I decided this was the worst place on earth, and that I would spend the whole weekend in my tent eating sausage rolls, until I could return to the normal world again. Then the next day, I woke up, wandered around the festival, watched some bands, decided I loved Glastonbury after all, and came back every time it was on for the next decade. It started with a joyless trudge, but turned out fine in the end.

3. Somewhere near Amsterdam, 2001

Music festivals continued to be a huge part of my life, and I expanded my remit to overseas festivals, reasoning that at least the weather would be better. Which leads us to Dance Valley, 2001. It was the centrepiece of a week in Amsterdam, and the festival itself was great fun, all kinds of electronic music, bright sunshine, and only slightly marred by a confusing system of two different kinds of token for food and drink (named munten and bonnen, which is still a catchphrase of sorts amongst that group of my friends). The sun shone all day, and when the festival ended around midnight, we all felt pretty euphoric.

And then the heavens opened.

The torrential rain shouldn’t have been too bad. All we had to do was to hop on one of the shuttle buses taking festival goers back to Amsterdam, and get back to our nice warm hostel. Except there were some, shall we say, logistical issues with the transport. There were 80,000 attendees, and only a very small number of buses, maybe enough for 1% of the people. We waited a while, and it became apparent that there were not very many more on the way either. We came to the same conclusion as most of the other people, that we had no choice but to start walking the 10 miles back to Amsterdam.

We started to trudge back, already soaked to the bone, and somehow getting more so, as the heavens opened further. I have never been wetter, colder or miserable in my whole life (actually I might have been more miserable, I was a teenager at one point after all, but definitely not the first two). The thousands of people walking along the sides of the roads took on the appearance of a grim death march. The festival goers were prepared for raving, not for a long hike in terrible conditions. They were in variously drunk, high, or both, and strangely enough didn’t have sensible walking boots or raincoats. It later turned out that quite a few ended up with pneumonia.

One of our party of six stopped to relieve himself, and somehow in the process we lost him, but we had little choice but to keep going. After what seemed like hours, when we still hadn’t reached even the outskirts of Amsterdam, a coach passed by, with room seemingly for us to get on. We flagged it down, and miraculously we were rescued and driven the rest of the way back to Amsterdam central station, just minutes from our hostel. We were of course worried about our missing friend. Would he have to walk the whole way? Would he end up in hospital or worse? We walked into our hostel, and there he was at the bar, in warm clothes, pint in hand, looking pretty pleased with himself. He had managed to get back by climbing into the luggage compartment of a bus. Not entirely safe perhaps, but an excellent choice in the circumstances.

Incidentally, this whole situation has a paragraph dedicated to it under ‘controversy’ on the festival’s wikipedia page. So definitely the most communal and famous of my joyless trudges.

4. Scarborough, 2012.

Most of my previous joyless trudges had been as a young, single and, frankly, stupid man. Surely in my thirties, married and supposedly more mature, I would no longer get into these situations? Apparently I would.

One day on a rainy weeks’ holiday in Scarborough with my wife, we decided to take a walk along the coast for something to do. It went well enough to begin with, but at one point we found ourselves slightly stuck. We were on one side of a beach which was split in two by cliffs and rocks, and it wasn’t clear how we could get to the other side, without retracing our steps, going back up the cliffs, along and down the other side.

We then realised that we could walk across a rocky patch around the bottom of the cliff to get to the other beach, and started to do so. This turned out to be a very bad idea. The rocks were not as stable as we thought, and started to slip away under our feet. The tide was also coming in, and suddenly the water was up to our feet, then our knees, then our thighs. I thought of all those people who get swept out to sea through swimming in dangerous spots, or trapped up a mountain, ill prepared for climbing. I always thought of them as stupid, and perhaps they were, but it turns out I was one of them.

It was one of the few times in my life I genuinely thought I might die, or even worse lead my wife to a death that I would rightly feel responsible for. But, fortunately it didn’t come to that. After some hairy moments, we just about managed to make our way across the slippery rocks to the safety of the next beach.

Quite an incident, but a joyless trudge? Near death experience? Perhaps. Nice walk interrupted by boneheaded decision? Definitely. But a joyless trudge? Well, the joyless trudge, really started. We had to walk back to the main road, feeling very stupid, our lower halves soaked, which, when dressed in jeans rather than waterproof trousers, was no fun at all. And we got some pretty funny looks on the bus back to Scarborough.

5. Hebden Bridge, 2013

You would imagine my wife and I would have learned from our Scarborough experience and planned our next walk more carefully, or given up walking altogether. Our trip to Hebden Bridge the next year suggests otherwise. We were there for a week, and it isn’t the biggest town, so we thought we spend one of days on a walk over the moor, past the Stoodley Pike monument and back into town.

We thought we were well prepared. We had directions, a map, food and water. This would be fine, fun even. Surely? Surely not.

Our first mistake was to choose to do this walk on an extremely hot July day. There was no cloud cover, and as we were on a moor, no shade. It soon became apparent that this was a terrible day for a long walk, and that the amount of water we had brought with us was painfully insufficient.

Our second mistake was assuming we were capable of following directions or maps. We were fine for maybe half the way, before getting confused and, eventually, lost. We were hungry, extremely sweaty, and very, very thirsty. Fortunately, before despair took hold, one of us (most likely my wife) realised that, as we were up a hill, and Hebden Bridge is in a valley with a river and canal running through it, if we headed generally downward we would eventually reach the river and or canal and be able to walk back into town.

So we did, and it worked, and we slowly trudged back towards Hebden Bridge, looking and feeling very shambolic, passing people enjoying much more pleasant, gentle, strolls along the canal, which is almost certainly what we should have done instead. As we reached the edge of town, we saw, almost mirage-like, a canal side pub. We dashed in, ordered food and downed pints of Coke faster than I could have imagined possible. It was almost worth it for how much we enjoyed those drinks. We have stunk out the place, but at least the trudge was over.