If 40 was the question, climbing a mountain was not the answer. I don’t know why people go looking for themselves when they approach middle age and I always swore I wouldn’t do it. But then I found myself a few months off the dreaded landmark birthday and off I went up Kilimanjaro. All I can say is I had a good look for myself over a distance of 80 miles, half of them uphill, and I couldn’t find anything. Apart from an irrepressible ability to moan and a total lack of intrepidness. If anything, I discovered that my capacity for pessimism and can’t-do spirit was far more robust than I had realised.
At the point when I was supposed to stare up at the snow-capped summit and envisage the triumph of my standing on the top, I stared up at the summit and thought, ‘Why would anyone want to go up there?’
I wasn’t the only one who had this reaction.
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