mildly moist

At the weekend I like to go for several long walks.

In particular, I like to go for a reasonably long walk just after lunch on both Saturday and Sunday. I also try to go for a shorter walk on Saturday and Sunday morning, but this can be disrupted by my schedule or the weather or, to be frank, if I'm feeling tired or unwell.

However, these shorter walks are bonuses, and it's the main big walk that really counts. I've talked about them before, but roughly speaking they're always based around where I live, so that I can just grab my keys and my MP3 player and go. I like to do them without dragging loads of accoutrements around and by doing them around where I live I know I'm always a reasonably short distance from home should I need to go back.

Now one of the things I've been trying to do with the walks is build up my distance. In fact, distance is my primary concern, and I try not to clock watch. Of course, watching the clock is useful - walking faster burns more calories - but I don't tend to think along the lines of doing a 45 minute walk, it's more about doing a 5km walk, or whatever.

But if you think about it these aspirations are slightly contradictory - how can I increase my distance, but still keep within a reasonable distance of home? Well, I could walk round in circles, and generally speaking most of my routes do involve circles, but eventually you get into the situation of repeating the loops, which is boring.

As such, I've been trying to go down some new routes, which are also circles, but which are bigger circles. In particular, I've been exploring the roads that (broadly) lead down to Sainsbury's and Farnham.

However, I've hit a bit of a snag over the last few weekends, and it's to do with the weather.

This last Sunday I set off on my walk, but, at what I was intending to be half way, it suddenly started raining. And I mean properly raining. I got very wet, very quickly.

At one point I stopped and waited under a bus shelter, but after 5 minutes it was becoming apparent that it wasn't a quick shower. Indeed, it actually continued to rain until I went to bed, but it meant I'd have to head home. But of course I was half way out on quite a long walk. If I'd have simply turned round it would pretty much have been the same distance.

What made the situation worse this last Sunday was I'd only take my light coat and not my hat. When I'd set off it was sunny and the forecast I'd seen the day before had said it would be sunny all day.

When a similar situation happened a couple of weeks back, I at least had my heavy coat and my hat. On Sunday, my coat was rendered ineffective after about ten minutes and I got so wet rain was dribbling down my face and my glasses were completely obscured. It actually reminded me of the more miserable experiences of school sports.

Hopefully of course the weather will improve and it won't be an issue. Or at least, it won't be an issue until the summer, when, presumably, I'll be moaning that it's too hot :).

From my perspective at the moment, though, I'm praying for the warm weather to roll on. For now, I've had quite enough of all the bone-chilling weather and rain, to be frank.