1: First Principles

A long walk to Rome. There, I've said it. Out in the open for any who care to take an interest. My solemn word and no mistake. I can't go back on this; I can't not do it now. Whether I like it or no, I shall after all be keeping this particular long-booked appointment with destiny: to gather together stick, rucksack, some few possessions, strike out from my London doorstep and walk to Rome.

It makes me judder just to think about it. With fear and anticipation certainly, but also with excitement.

It all started back in January, when I celebrated my sixtieth birthday with friends and immediate family in our brilliant new (old) home overlooking the sea on the North Kent coast. It was a terrific bash, and left me with a sense of awe and wonder about the passage of time, all the hard and beautiful things to remember and fullness of life in general.

My restaurant business was going okay, my kids were getting safely through school and on to college and life was sweet. There were no dark and threatening storm clouds ahead that I could see. I wasn't sure what lay before me but it seemed like I was launching a whole new chapter.

Fast-forward then to late spring, when I gradually became aware of something not right with my health. I thought maybe I was drinking too much wine, so I tried cutting down. That didn't seem to make any difference. I got some photos done in a photo-booth for my free London travel card and I looked so terrible and cadaverous it was physically painful to look at them.

On a wine buying trip to the Loire I got these pains in my stomach that defied all medicinal remedies. (Just what is French for "Alka Selzer", anyway?) I thought I'd maybe eaten something bad - a dodgy confit duck leg seemed the prime suspect. The winemaker said I looked as white as the limestone wall I stood next to. I got back home again to the Kent coast, but was due the next day in London with my pallets of wine for a school reunion lunch party for twenty-three I was hosting in my restaurant.

The pain came on hard the next morning, so I asked my wife to call a taxi to take me to the local hospital. The cabbie looked troubled. Even while I writhed in pain, and sweat rolled off my face, I somehow thought that I was perfectly alright, and in danger of wasting everyone's time. I reckoned I was constipated. The doctors seemed perplexed at first, and minded to agree. I counselled my wife to hold open the barbecue party arranged for the next day.

But next morning, 1 June 2014, I was in the operating theatre of Margate hospital, undergoing emergency treatment for a ruptured, gangrenous appendix.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I nearly died earlier this year, and I believe that this brush with death has changed me profoundly. It gave me a jolt, and made me see things in a different light. It means a change in priorities is certainly due, if not overdue, and it helps lift one's gaze from the merely here and now, and everyday. Not to sound too sententious, it has given me a new start, and I mean to celebrate this new beginning, this deliverance, with a great adventure, a long walk to Rome.

It is a trial. It will test me. I shall need to live on my wits, show physical courage and strength of character. I shall see France and Italy, both of which I love, at very close hand. I will meet many new people and have adventures. I will write about my experiences as I travel. I will walk a very long way and hopefully gain sponsorship money for a worthwhile local charity. It is a pilgrimage, of sorts. There is a religious dimension of course, but what is there in life which hasn't? If you think about it, a long walk is rather a good metaphor for a life, with all its hopes and setbacks, scrapes and near-misses, and beginning, middle and end. It is no wonder that so many older people aspire to do it. I don't exactly imagine myself as epic hero, but I have read enough Homer right back since school days to inspire and quicken an appetite for such a journey as this.

I will break the walk into stages of perhaps two to three weeks at a time. I will, after all, need to maintain my restaurant in London as well as the fledgling wine import business we have created.

At the end of this process I hope to have had some fun and adventures, and to glimpse, if only at a distance, possibilities of enlightenment. In short I may come to know myself a little better, and doesn't that make it a quest noble enough to be worth the candle?