….leaving me to wonder why we thought 9 was a good idea on this stretch. We’ve just completed day 7 and it really feels like it.

It was another day of starting with wet trainers thanks to the radiator not working in our room. The pictures of Prince Philip everywhere, in frames that didn’t fit the photos were an odd touch too.

Nevertheless, breakfast was great and set us up well for a lot of walking along country lanes. These are not ankle twistingly painful, like canal paths and fields; neither do we have to dodge cars as often or as quickly, as we do on the main roads. However, we never know until we get onto the road whether we have replanned our route down a rat run that drivers speed on to outpace traffic on the main road or a quiet lane. Thankfully today, most fell into the latter category.

However, none of them are straight for more than about 50 metres, meaning that we are constantly crossing the road to avoid being invisible to oncoming cars round blind bends.

So with replanning the route to avoid main roads and then zigzagging along the side roads we have two consequences to deal with:

1. today was a long 35km rather than the 33km we anticipated after rerouting the 27km original version.

2. all our conversations are like the ones we had before the internet was invented because we can’t stop and Google right in front of a blind bend with no pavement. 

The consequences of 1. is just tough luck. This trip has always been on a schedule and is about going from John O’ Groats to Land’s End, not meandering for a few miles each day while sight seeing. You might wonder though, why we didn’t plan better before we left home, rather than doing it on the fly every night. A great question.

We had planned to do this trip with a campervan that we would drive ~15 miles south each day to a place near a public transport hub. We would then catch a train or bus back to our start point and walk to the campervan as our bed and potentially kitchen each night. The plan was to sell the campervan when we finished, for not much less than we bought it for, given the relatively little extra mileage we would have done in it. Genius plan. We bought the campervan months before we needed it in case anything went wrong with it and then 3 weeks before we were due to leave, it blew its head gasket. So whilst sorting out how to repair a campervan we had barely even driven ourselves, retiring from two full time roles and managing a loft conversion, we had next to no time to replan the entire route with 50 BnB bookings down the length of the UK, all at an average distance of ~18 miles from each other. This also explains how we managed to book the Selkie House in Helmsdale for the 30th July 2027, not 2026.

By now, our original plan would have had us 575 miles down the UK and we’ve actually walked 641 miles.

The consequences of 2. is actually quite fun. Today we were talking about developmental biology, a topic neither of us frankly knows anything about, although tangentially, as a biochemist by training, I can vaguely recall how DNA behaves and the details of a few enzyme pathways. The topic arose from something that is no fun at all: someone we know has recently had CAR-T therapy, which a) sucks that they need this, b) is an incredible feat of DNA engineering and pharmaceutical research. Go scientists.

Down one of our usual conversational rabbit holes, Mark wanted to know exactly how you got different bits of DNA into the human genome, using the example of what he had to hand at the time: a banana. We had a full on lengthy conversation about how you might insert the gene for banana scent into a human and what the consequences might be. Just in case you’re wondering, I hasten to add that the T cell gene added in CAR-T therapy recognises a protein called BCMA, not the enzyme alcohol acetyltransferase, that is responsible for making bananas smell like bananas. Mark now knows a fair bit about transfection of DNA into cells to achieve either transient or stable incorporation of DNA into the genome.

This conversation led onto how you target genes to be in the right place at the right time, either for therapeutic purposes or how the body manages this normally. For example, when you are a ball of cells only 2mm long and both your heart and eye start to develop, how does each bit know how to be a heart or an eye and not vice versa. We were both violently in agreement that there are sets of genes that must switch on only if they are part of an eye or a heart, but not both, but what tells the cells in the first place, “hey girls, (they are daughter cells of the original, not sons, trust me on this one) you are going to be the beating heart here, not the eyeballs, toenails, anywhere else, just the heart. You go girls”

I hazarded an educated guess at gradients of differing signals down the length of the embryo playing a key role, which is actually pretty accurate / 99% of the explanation. However, that’s not the point. While we were on Warrant road for ~15km, neither of could close the conversation down in an instant by googling that, and neither of us would have wanted to.

When the land around is so flat that the most famous thing here is Wrekin hill; something Scotland and the Lake District would call a “blip” rather than actually name, these random conversations will be some of my clearest and most fun memories of this trip.

Finally we reached the outskirts of Telford, about 30 minutes before the heavens opened. With feet that needed some rest and air, we chose Deliveroo for supper. Guess what Wagamama has on the base of its salmon teriyaki…….

Physical distance travelled – too far at 35km, but still managing to be less than day 9 of this stretch, which will be an unexpected extra bonus marathon day.

Possible distance to travel conversationally – infinite.