During our 18 years together, brought to an end by his sudden death in 2022, David and I graduated from gentle strolls to epic hikes, walking thousands of miles together. No wonder then that ‘our’ song was The Proclaimers’ equally maligned and loved ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)’. To many, it is the cheesiest Scot-pop song imaginable. To us though, it was a deeply romantic poem, and a promise to each other. “When I'm lonely, well, I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who's lonely without you.”

So, I thought it was about time to put my feet where my mouth is. In August and September 2024, I’ll be walking #500milesforDavid, starting along the waterways of London, moving on to the Essex, Kent and Sussex coasts, then to Scotland, ending with the Great Glen Way, which conveniently ends where my parents live in Inverness. (As they live just over 500 miles from me, I did briefly consider walking from my home to theirs, but even I am not mad enough to hike along the M1 and A9.)

I am doing this for David, as a way to remember and honour him, to go back to places he loved, and to visit others he never got to; I am doing this for myself, as a way of facing up to my new reality, and, as the great Julia Samuels says, doing the work of grief; but here’s where you come in: I’m also doing it for Marie Curie, to raise some much-needed funds for their amazing work with terminally ill people.

In the final week of David’s life, we both moved into the Marie Curie Hospice, Hampstead (a building that we had actually walked past many times on one of our regular routes). Some of you will know all too well of the wonderful work that hospices do. Others will never see it first hand, and part of me hopes for your sake that you don’t, but at the most terrible of times, it’s a truly extraordinary place to be. What being at the hospice meant for us was privacy and peace. It was more like a hotel than a hospital. The nursing team looked after David with great compassion and respect, family were able to visit easily, and I was able to be with him 24/7, until the very end. To borrow from Hamilton, no one else was in the room where it happened.

The scourge of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC to its enemies) has - devastatingly - rendered the Hampstead hospice unusable for the time being, but the charity’s work continues apace, supporting terminally ill people in their own homes, in hospitals and in the community. Money for this essential work is tight and far from immune from the economic downturn and cost-of-living crisis of event years.

Please consider sponsoring me here. I’ll let you know how I’m getting on. Thank you.

P.S. We will not discuss the jarring reality that the song lyrics in effect constitute a promise to walk a thousand miles.