At St Bees:- Countdown - One day till 'Adverture Day'.

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Looking north to St Bees Head from the beach. Some people find the rattling noise the waves make as gravity sucks the salt water back through the shingle quite disturbing. I'm fortunate, I don't. The following day, when we started our walking adventure, all this had disappeared, masked from sight by a thick, wet, sea mist that imbued the day with a strangely silent and ghostly cloyingness through which shadowy figures emerged then vanished into the murk.

The Day before DAY 1 of our adventure: The cruise to across the Irish Sea aboard the Ben-my-Chree

After checking in, and having no wish to become an unwitting candidate for extraordinary rendition, I thought it wise to seek security clearance for my tubular tungsten tipped walking stick. In the prevailing political climate of fundamentalism and extreme official responses, it seemed imprudent to make assumptions about what might be classified as a weapon of mass destruction and what was merely aluminium tubing.

  “Is this style of hiker’s pole OK to take aboard?” I asked a security man, identified by his uniform of high visibility orange oilskins.

  “Too true Yessir!” was the official response. “Believe you me, in the Isle of Man there’s no limit to the number or variety of walking sticks that cripples or the elderly can carry at any time.”