Day Five: Dream Homes, Cherry Blossom, and Andy's Complicated Feelings About His Wife

No snow. I awoke to absolutely no snow. The tops of the hills were white, I could see that much, sitting there looking smug from a distance, but down where we were, camping in the cold like a pair of optimistic idiots, there was nothing. Not a flake. The Met Office and I remain in a formal dispute about this and I have not softened my position.

We packed up. We started walking. It was very cold. Gonzo pressed on. About an hour and a half into the day I looked down at my watch and realised I hadn't started it.

I'm going to be straightforward about this: I feel like a numpty. The whole point of tracking the walk is to have the whole walk tracked, and I have now missed approximately 5km of it, gone forever into the statistical void, unrecorded and unacknowledged by any device. I know the steps happened. My legs know the steps happened. The watch does not know, and the watch is the one writing the official report. I've logged my frustration here instead. It doesn't help, but it's something. We dropped down into Glen Lochay and everything immediately improved. You remember I said something nice about that old military road near Dalmally? Take whatever I said and multiply it by ten. Glen Lochay is the kind of place that recalibrates what you think a good life might look like. Quiet, green, the River Lochay doing its thing alongside the road, hills on all sides doing theirs.

And then I saw the house.

I don't know who lives there and I don't want to know, because knowing would make it real and make it someone else's and I prefer to keep it in the category of theoretical mine. It's spacious, old style, the kind that looks like someone took a croft and modernised it with actual taste, which is rarer than it should be. It sits next to trees, next to hills, next to the river. Five or six miles from Killin, which means you're close enough to a shop, a coffee place, a pub or two, a restaurant on a Friday when you can't face cooking. Far enough that nobody turns up uninvited.

I did not take any photos of it on purpose. If I did id just spend my days looking at it.

I have genuinely never wanted a house more. I have no realistic plan to acquire it. I'm choosing not to let that diminish the feeling. I should explain the Sakura thing. Apparently Andy has a habit with his wife Rose, when they see cherry blossoms together, they shout "Sakura!" It's their thing. Sweet, really. The kind of small shared ritual that holds a relationship together.

What is less sweet, or at least less dignified, is that Andy has begun doing this to me.

Every cherry blossom tree we pass, he shouts it. At me. His temporary walking companion. His decidedly non-Rose associate.

The conclusion I've reached is that he must be missing her. That's the charitable read. The less charitable read is that Andy is just verbally handsy like that and needs a temporary wife. ​Rose, if you ever read this: I feel your pain. I genuinely do. He's relentless.

We're ​in Killin. Lunch has been had. Gear is being reset, blisters addressed, strains acknowledged, the various complaints of the body being attended to with varying degrees of success.

We are sore. We are about halfway. Both of those things are true simultaneously and somehow that's fine, the halfway point does something to the psychology of it. You've done enough to know you can do it. The second half is just proof.

We'll continue on.

The house is mine in spirit. Andy can visit but he has to call ahead.