Male ambition

Women, I am sometimes forced to conclude, just don’t get it.

A cold, sunny day in early January, and I am following a footpath across some fields. This is because I have finally got round to a biography of Captain Lawrence Oates which has been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for at least four years. The spur is the fast-approaching 100th anniversary of Oates’s death — the least I can do is pay him the courtesy of getting it read by then. Inevitably called I Am Just Going Outside, Michael Smith’s book has proved to be a corker. One of the many things I never knew about Oates was that he was from Gestingthorpe, an Essex village just over the border from my home in Suffolk. As a tribute to the famous walker, and in a post-Christmas fit of energy, I decide to journey there by foot. My partner asks the same question she asks about many of my enterprises: ‘Why?’ But the dog seems happy enough, so off we set.