Walks of 2024

Obviously the year is not over and I walk year round but I have finished my 'challenge' walks for the season.

I have been doing The Conqueror Challenges since 2020 and the year after I opted to walk a Marathon (aptly for the Marathon to Athens challenge) and then various Stupidly Long Walks out in the wild to make things more meaningful and more of an *actual* challenge. This year was no different although I mixed it up a bit.

Previously I have chosen to walk distances around the 20 mile mark, overnight. I like walking at night for several reasons: less risk of dehydration or heat exhaustion, I sunburn badly and my eyes are very photosensitive, less people which make an emergency pee in the bushes less of a problem, less traffic and the advantage of headlights making approaching vehicles easier to spot.

Slough to Ascot

My first walk of the year was a fairly modest 13 mile walk to do a section I'd had to re-jig on the aforementioned Marathon to Athens walk - I had intended to take The Long Walk into Windsor Great Park and along the edge of Virginia Water but Google Maps had failed to tell me the park closed at night!

This walk was consequently a daytime one and exceedingly painful as I had made a rookie error with my new hiking trainers but I'm glad to have done it.

The White Cliffs Of Dover

My first mini-break of the year was three nights in Dover to do my English Channel challenge. I'd rather have swum it but having to book swimming sessions just doesn't work for me. I had hoped to wild swim it in my local river until a pollution event put me right off the idea. As it was 2024 really didn't have enough 'summer' to make that workable.

The first walk was a yet more modest 8.3 miles from my hotel in Dover to Folkestone Central passing Samphire Hoe and Abbot's Cliff Sound Mirror. I was a bit peeved that the cliff path I had intended to take had been permanently closed off. Despite the lack of summer this was during a heatwave and I was melting when I set out before dawn!

The second walk was 9.7 miles from Deal Station back to my hotel via the Dover Patrol Memorial, St Margaret's Bay, and Foreland Lighthouse. This was a tad more comfortable as it was less insanely hot... or I had aclimatised.

In between I walked up the Dame Vera Lynn Way to Langdon Bay for a mooch around, and after both 'major' walks I mooched the marina and the New Pier.

Not only were the walks daytime AND rougher terrain than I am used to (absolutely LOVING my hiking poles!) but I had not before committed myself to do two challenging walks on consecutive days. It went pretty well overall but I gave myself such terrible blisters that I had to buy some Barbie Pink sandals from a nearby Poundland so I could get home again!

Cotswold Adjacent

Last year I ended up doing part of the Jurassic Coast Path (toward my Jurassic Coast challenge) from Weymouth purely because I couldn't make a decision about the Cotswold Way challenge.

I chose Chippenham because it is near the Cotswolds, the hotel was affordable, and on the Intercity line. The Cotswold Way proper is not easy to get to if you're dependent on trains as I am.

My first walk was 15.7 miles from Bath Station (the finishing point of the virtual challenge is in Bath) to my hotel in Chippenham. As I have already walked the Bath Road between Newbury and Twyford I have decided to challenge myself to complete the whole thing.

As the actual Cotswold Way was unavailable I looked to Cotswolds-set detective dramas - and that section crosses Box Hill. The Brunel-built Box Hill Tunnel featured in an episode of Macdonald & Dodds.

That first walk went okay. A few more shoe-based issues and some pretty torrential rain on the final stretch but no real dramas. I did the walk the first night of my stay, getting back to the hotel about 5am.

There was however, one problem: the final stretch of that walk would be repeated on the next... and it would be clearly impassible in daylight hours. There were no paths, overgrown verges and even at 3am there was more traffic than I cared for. The second walk *had* to be after dawn so, to quote Hercule Poirot, this caused my furiously to think.

In the end my daughter helped me re-jig the second walk which was a 10.5 mile loop from hotel to Yatton Keynell (purely because I had to visit Tiddleywink), South to Biddestone, North again to Giddeahall and then back into Chippenham. I set out before dawn - sunrise hit a little south of Yatton Keynell - and was back by 9am. That way I was able to avoid encountering much traffic on the roads while still being able to get photos of Biddestone - which is Carsley in the TV adaptation of Agatha Raisin.

Yatton Keynell and Biddestone ARE in the Cotswolds proper, but only just... so my third and final walk of this mini-break aimed to avoid any ambiguity. I took a couple of trains to get to Kemble (no connection with the fictional Kembleford of Father Brown). From here I did a very short 4.5 mile loop up to the Thames Head (source of the River Thames) back down along the Thames Path (even though there was no river to be seen) and back into Kemble.

Southampton

I'd booked a single night in a hotel for a gig that got postponed so naturally I went for a walk!

7.4 miles took me across the Itchen Bridge along to a park called Miller's Pond - I wrote a book called The McKerrows of Miller's Pond on Wattpad - from there up Kathleen Road (my younger daughter's name) along to a 'Spoons where I ate and drank entirely too much, and then back via Northam Bridge.

I got lost twice! Firstly I managed to take a wrong turn out of the 'Spoons, then later I almost ended up in St Mary's Stadium!

That got me back to the hotel around midnight and then in the morning I mooched around Southampton taking in a selection of Titanic memorials. On my way back to the station I got DRENCHED! Even my undercrackers were soaked. I had to change back into my previous day's clothes in the loo on the train which were still somewhat moist from being in my backpack!

Slough To Twyford

My final 'big' walk of the season was a fairly simple overnight stretch of the Bath Road - 13.7 miles. I'll have to revisit Maidenhead sometime - it looked very nice! Unfortunately I really buggered up my left knee on this one. No idea how but it caused me issues almost from the get-go. I had hoped to walk all the way home (a total 17.2 miles) but by Twyford it was excruciating so I sucked up the expense and caught a train and bus home even though I had to sit at Twyford Station for almost two hours waiting for the first train of the day.

Verdict

I still have one more mini-break this year - my first ever visit to Derby - but being December I am unlikely to stray far. 

I may not have done any really big walks this year but I certainly feel that I have succeeded in getting out of my comfort zone with back-to-back walks, off road routes, and daytime walks. 

2025

I intend to walk Nine Mile Ride (14.7 miles) toward one of my Harry Potter challenges - taking in the real-world location of 4 Privet Drive before walking home.

I'm hoping to do some more of the Bath Road - perhaps Slough to Houslow with a detour up to St Dunstan's, Cranford where some ancestors are allegedly buried. That'd be about 12.9 miles. I'm also trying to work out the logistics of the central Chippenham to Newbury section - hopefully breaking at Avebury and Hungerford (Chippenham to Avebury - 13.4 miles, Avebury to Hungerford - 16.7 miles, Hungerford to Newbury - 9.5 miles).

I have a load of challenge codes banked including London which I'd like to at least partially complete real-world.

As for mini-breaks the Southampton gig has been rescheduled for January which is not very conducive for walking and the only other thing I have booked is a gig in London in March... and I haven't even booked accommodation!

On Unambiguous Grey

I have just brought myself to listen to Colby J Ryan's YouTube video "The Lori Vallow Interview // The Scar Wars Podcast Ep 3" and I do mean 'brought myself to' because listening to Lori is not a prospect I relish.

TO RECAP:
Colby Ryan is Lori Vallow Daybell's son, her only surviving child.
Lori is in jail serving a whole life sentence for killing his (half) sister Tylee (16) and his adopted brother JJ (7). She is awaiting trial for the murder of his stepfather Charles Vallow (62) and the attempted murder of Brandon Boudreaux (what relation is the estranged-and-now-ex husband of your mother's niece?!). Lori is also suspected (by followers of the case, not the authorities sadly) of killing Joe Ryan - Lori's third husband, Colby's adoptive father, Tylee's bio dad.
Confused?! May I recommend Bailey Sarian's video on the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-GuonthUgY or East Idaho News' extensive coverage.
Colby has been INCREDIBLY deeply harmed by the sins of his mother (Sins Of Our Mother was a 2022 Netflix documentary mini series on the case).

Now I was very curious to follow the Lori Vallow trial as I expected her to have come up with at least some sort of cover story, some explanation of what happened to her children. I was astonished she offered no defence at all. The closest we got was at her sentencing when she said that 'no one was killed' and speculated about accidental death, suicide, and reactions to medication.
Subsequently I watched the Chad Daybell trial in the hopes that he would have some sort of story, even if it was to throw Lori under the bus where she belongs. Nada.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely think the kids were killed primarily so that Chad and Lori would not be encumbered with them (even though she was nearly of age Tylee had to die as they'd never hope to dispose of JJ with her still around) and, to an extent, for their social security money from the deaths of their dads (Tylee for Joe Ryan, JJ for Charles Vallow). But the entire scenario was SO STUPID. How could they possibly hope to get away with it?! There had to have been some plan, surely? And even if there was no plan surely they'd try to wrangle together some sort of explanation to mitigate their responsibility??? Apparently not...

I am possessed of some imagination, I can come up with a bunch of scenarios that, whilst unlikely to be believed in court, might at least cast some doubt...
For example:
Tylee dies first. She was a teenage girl suffering from pancreatitis and ovarian cysts. Perhaps she'd had enough of the pain, perhaps she was suffering from mood swings. Perhaps she was horribly depressed from the upheavals of her young life - death of her bio dad, death of her stepdad, being moved to a whole new state...
Suppose then that she took her own life... maybe she left a note where she blamed all her misery on her mother? It is not so very hard to imagine a parent freaking out and hiding the evidence. Even an accidental OD and Lori *might* have made a very bad decision.
Tylee was supposed to be going off to university early. This didn't hold up as she had never applied but would likely keep family and friends from becoming suspicious, at least for some time. A better idea would have been to claim Tylee had run away...
Anyway, with Tylee disposed of Lori may have underestimated how much she relied on the parentification of her daughter - Tylee did A LOT for her autistic little brother. Maybe Lori's eye was off the ball so to speak and JJ died... there's a reason plastic bags have a keep-out-of-reach-of-children warning on them!
Having already buried Tylee on Chad's land (which was INCREDIBLY STUPID, Idaho is full of empty space) perhaps it 'only made sense' to those two idiots to do the same with JJ. Perhaps they were afraid JJs death would make the authorities realise Tylee was missing. So they buried JJ too.
But none of this holds up to scrutiny.
Certainly the failure to successfully cremate Tylee explains a difference in the burials but if JJ had died an accidental death why would they leave the bag on his head?! How could they have hoped to explain the disappearance of a 7 year old child? Unless they were to claim that Tylee had returned and kidnapped JJ or even fake a stranger abduction - which they didn't - it simply wasn't feasible that both kids could be gone. Lori and Chad weren't worried about the kids *at all* which was absolutely damning.

So almost a year and a half on from Lori being convicted it was interesting to see whether she'd managed to invent any kind of a story... Sadly it never crossed my mind that she could have accepted any responsibility but that's just as well because she won't.

Firstly, I want to credit Colby on his self-control. How he could listen to his mother's nonsense and offer her 'forgiveness' - before justifiably cutting her out of his life - is utterly beyond me. I'd have told her to shut her lying mouth, tell her she was evil through and through, and hang up. That'd have been about three minutes into the call that lasted AN HOUR. The number of moments where his expression was just *shooketh* that she would come out with such utter CRAP was heartbreaking.

Lori ranted about how she's the only one who knows, and how Colby is the only one ("apart from me" she qualifies) who really cared about the kids. Some comments on the video cited examples they saw as love-bombing, others of emotional manipulation (being apparently tearful one moment then speaking in a normal tone the next), but one of the really noticeable traits was STALLING FOR TIME. She didn't answer questions directly but talked round in circles as if hoping Colby would miss that she hadn't answered; then, when pressed for an answer, it seemed to be created on the fly.
After FIVE YEARS she still hadn't thought of a plausible or coherent cover story. Why? Because she is stupid? Possibly. She's certainly not very bright. But I think it's mostly because she finds it so audacious that he especially, her own son, dares to question her.
Honestly? I'm kinda disappointed. I don't want there to be any doubt of her guilt but the truth is just so damned uncomfortable.

But what I want to really expound upon here is the concept of GREY.

We talk about good and evil, heaven and hell, sanity and madness, black and white. Grey is taken to be an ambiguous middle ground where the two polar opposites are co-mingled.

There is, however, another form of grey. An absolute of grey.

Imagine the metaphor as a saucer - a dollop of white paint on the left rim, a dollop of black on the other and the grey mixed between them. So far, so straightforward right?
Q) Where is this 'other' grey area?
A) UNDER THE SAUCER.
It's a grey made not of paint but of shadow. A grey that exists not of blending two things but in the absence of either. Good and evil are social constructs - this is a grey are that belongs to a time before society was constructed.
Perhaps an easier grey to understand is one where white paint is joy and black is misery - the shades of grey are the remaining spectrum of human emotions while the absolute of grey is completely devoid of such - a complete numbness to anything and everything. If you can't experience joy why avoid the causes of misery? In the same vein, if you can't experience guilt or shame why would you avoid evil?

Is Lori good or evil?
I suggest that she is neither, merely amoral. She appeared to Colby to have been a good mother in the past - but it is my belief that she did not change, suddenly or over time; she was never good. The good mom was a role she was playing, that suited her - benefitted her - at the time.
Her inability to accept the evil in her own actions suggests to me that she doesn't even fully understand the concept. Evil to her is an abstract thing that applies to historical events and other people.
She's so self-centred that whatever she does is clearly okay because she's the one doing it - the literal centre of the universe in her eyes. A clear parallel to her mindset can be seen in Israel who is blind to the horrors it is wreaking on Palestine due to a mindset of being God's chosen people and a chronic victim complex: it is simply inconceivable that Israel could ever do evil so they bomb indiscriminately 'safe' in their arrogant assurance of righteousness.

Is Lori sane or mad?
Again, I'm going to say neither. She's neither in her right mind nor out of her mind; her mind is just fundamentally WRONG.
She's refused to co-operate but a narcissistic personality disorder seems a likely diagnosis... which isn't an illness precisely, nor is an excuse for her actions. Lots of narcissists live law-abiding if somewhat dysfunctional lives. She knows what she did was 'wrong' but simply doesn't care. One of her stock phrases has been 'doesn't count for me' - she believes she is above the rules of society which is pretty 'insane' to a lay person but not actually a sign of actual loopyness (to use the correct sciency words lol).
I don't believe she is suffering from any illness or that she has experienced any brain injury. I don't believe she is mentally incompetent - as I said before I think she's incredibly stupid for imagining she's convincing anyone of her innocence - but not in a scarily low IQ and needing a responsible adult kind of way.
I don't believe she can be cured or even successfully treated. Perhaps if the kink in her personality had shown itself earlier in life therapy might've been productive but at 51 as she is now she's simply wallowed too long in her own self importance to ever be disabused of the notion.
I also don't believe she acted under the influence of an evil male - be it Chad or her conveniently dead brother Alex. Folie à deux is an old-fashioned 'diagnosis' and a vague possibility but as most of the victims benefited Lori, not Chad or Alex, if there was any shared psychosis Lori was the instigator. Chad has always seemed weak and suggestible; I got the impression Lori had a Cersei Lannister kind of hold over Alex too.
A lot is made of 'religious mania' or 'delusions of grandeur' but they are symptoms, not diagnostic traits. People can be excessively religious, hold unhinged beliefs, be incredibly big-headed... but it doesn't make them crazy, or wicked.
Do I think she really believes she's a personal friend of Jesus and that God's law doesn't apply to her? Again, no. I think it's a convenient way of excusing her actions whilst confirming how 'special' she is.

Take this section of dialogue from Guardians Of The Galaxy (2014):

• Rhomann Dey : I have a family who are alive because of you. Your criminal records have also been expunged. However, I have to warn you against breaking any laws in the future.

  Rocket Raccoon : Question. What if I see something that I want to take, and it belongs to someone else?

  Rhomann Dey : Well you will be arrested.

  Rocket Raccoon : But what if I want it more than the person who has it?

  Rhomann Dey : Still illegal.

  Rocket Raccoon : That doesn't follow. No, I want it more, sir. Do you understand?

  [to Gamora who's laughing] 

  Rocket Raccoon : What are you laughing at? Why? I can't have a discussion with this gentleman?

  Drax the Destroyer : What if someone does something irksome and I decide to remove his spine?

  Rhomann Dey : That's... that's actually murder. It's one of the worst crimes of all, so also illegal.

  Drax the Destroyer : Hmm.

Lori was presenting as a perfectly sane person until just like Rocket she decided she wanted something (be it Chad or the kids' money) more than the person who had it, and then just like Drax she found Tylee irksome and decided to remove her spine. Which is disturbingly accurate - see forensic testimony for details.
The difference is that Lori had known all along that taking other people's property is wrong, as is murder. There's a certain argument that the USA is actually a lawless corner of the universe where this'd make sense but again it doesn't hold up ;)

I met a girl like Lori once, only a kid and she didn't do anything violent or wicked but honestly she was one of the most frightening people I have even met... and I've met some scary folk! It wasn't that she was a compulsive liar, it was the fact she didn't care about being believed. Most liars are attention seeking - they want sympathy, validation, or whatever, or it's a power trip about fooling others. She wasn't giving those vibes at all.
It was literally the only time I interfered in my children's friendships; I told them to be EXTREMELY CAUTIOUS on what they told her about anything as I suspected she would either adopt stories as her own or use it against us (we haven't got much in the way of skeletons in the closet but everyone has things they'd rather not broadcast) and I BANNED HER FROM THE HOUSE. Literally one meeting and I never wanted this kid near me again. This was the sort of kid who might accuse anyone of anything and in an age of 'believe all victims' they might just do that.

The point is, every word that came out of Lori's mouth had that same vibe. She was bullshitting but not for clout, not to be believed, not out of any emotion at all. She is a truly frightening person and I am immensely relieved that she'll never be out of jail again. I can only hope she is not allowed to influence / corrupt other vulnerable inmates.