Only a real nut case would spend his entire annual holiday entitlement trudging five hundred miles under a heavy pack and a blazing sun when he could have been sprawled out on a beach with his wife. But when you have commuted your way into your mid-fifties something inside you suddenly screams that life is rushing past and it's time you started doing those things you have always wanted to do - like walking right across France from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean in one month, not knowing where you will spend the night, who you will meet or whether you will ever reach the other end. After a month of studying the French kissing code, dicing with death on railway bridges, pushing your legs through the final pain barrier and whiling the evening away (in blissful ignorance) with a very attractive prostitute, you realise that this is life and it's the other eleven months which are unreal.