A rest day has inevitably meant three things:

1. Practical stuff like buying paracetamol, blister plasters and sending Mark’s passport back to the passport office. This will allow the passport office to issue his second passport so we can both be sure of getting all the African country visas we need from October onwards. We’ve tried booking the rabies vaccine we need, but we can’t get a date this far ahead and now there’s a national shortage. So that’s working well.
2. We went to the cinema, to see The End of Oak Street. We’ve done this so you don’t have to. Just watch Jurassic Park again, it’s the same thing, but better. You’re welcome.
3. Celebrating being one third of the  way,  324miles/519km in by eating curry and drinking whisky. Glasgow is a great place for this kind of activity.

Glasgow is like a change management project all of its own. You can read the online detail about it: how it was a thriving ship building city to the point of severe overcrowding and poverty, particularly when ship building wasn’t needed so much. So at about the same time the city decided to move everyone out of the centre of town in crime ridden tenements into leafy suburbs, thereby splitting social networks in half with a motorway through the middle of the city. Now if you Google “what are the dodgy bits of Glasgow” it says the suburbs aren’t great and the city centre gets a bit leary after closing time. So all of it, still dodgy.

In the meantime, the city has tried. It’s hosted the Commonwealth games; is known for its music scene, food and it has some beautiful architecture, notably by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The city has a new brand: “People make Glasgow” recognising that it isn’t the buildings or entertainment opportunities that need to change, it’s behaviours.

Sadly, when, there are huge billboards like this in town,

cigarette butts litter the streets and we’ve seen more arse cheeks and cleavage than the average German spa bath, just walking down the street, it’s clear that not all behaviours have changed that much. The stats also show that Glasgow has an obesity prevalence 5% higher than the rest of the UK, probably because both its curry and whisky are very good. 

So, maybe, subliminally, that’s one of the reasons I also spent a few mins buying a new pair of trainers after realising that my current pair likely do not have sufficient grip on the sole, or in fact sufficient sole itself, to get me through the Lake District. We should be on B roads for the next week, but there’s no chance of getting new trainers until we are well beyond the Lake District, so today was the day. I’ve traded waterproof for comfortable grippy soles, so we’ll see how long it takes for me to regret that decision. I do want to end this trip fitter than I started though. Perhaps the next 7 days will do it before we have another rest day, with 5 of those days 20+ miles, two of which are as long as a marathon distance.

Distance – still managed to walk 11km today