Walking on air

The journey from Epping to the village of Castleton, in the Peak District, took six hours last Friday afternoon. It was cold and miserable, but my best mate, who runs an outdoors-activities company, had told me that this walking weekend was ‘unmissable’, as it was going to be ‘heaving with single women’. So in the interests of providing material for this blog, I felt duty-bound to attend.

In the evening, I dragged myself around five of the village’s six pubs. As if my chances of pulling weren't slim enough, sitting at the bar like a Billy-no-Mates doing the Sun crossword, I was wearing a will4adventure.com t-shirt (hardly a sartorial statement), as requested by my mate, so that any of his clients could come over and introduce themselves. But nobody did.

After five hours (12 across was particularly tricky), I gave up and headed back to the hostel to bed. But the cold (the room was an old stable block, and despite me appropriating most of the available blankets, I was shivering all night) and the noisiness of my room-mates returning drunk at intervals throughout the small hours, ensured that I didn’t close my eyes all night.

Things didn’t get any better when I met my fellow walkers – the woman that my mate had considered ‘my type’ had failed to turn up. I took one look at the others (estimating that six were single), decided that I didn’t fancy any of them (in fairness, it is hard to look good in walking clothes) and proceeded to spend the entire day bemoaning my love life to my best mate’s missus. And I had forsaken a day's wages for this.

At the end of what was a beautiful walk, I headed back to the hostel to get smartened up, while a few headed straight for the pub. When I got there, two women from Bristol were sitting in the company of my best mate. I settled down and we proceeded to have a good conversation, mainly about being single in your thirties (as they both were).

One of the women went upstairs to freshen up, while the other remained in the bar. More and more of the group gradually joined us. I got chatting to the remaining Bristolian and we were soon having a good conversation. Her mate returned, while another of the single women turned up, having made a real effort (although she couldn’t shake off the other single man in the group, who rarely left her side all weekend).

Now I’m not particularly into high-maintenance women, but I would generally draw the line at chatting up a woman who was wearing filthy walking boots and a skanky fleece. But the conversation was good – and the beer flowing.

One by one, everyone else went to bed. My best mate and his wife were driving back to Sheffield and offered me a warm bed in their house. I declined. It was soon just the two of us. I’d had no particular positive signs during the evening (I’d popped over for a pep-talk from my best mate’s missus halfway through the evening, and she had agreed that the Bristolian’s body language was not great). In fact, there had been an anorak on the bench seat between us all night.

But I slowly worked my way to sitting with our legs touching, before subtly putting my arm behind her. When she started leaning back against me, I was beginning to think that my luck might be changing.

Within minutes, we were snogging and, in all honesty, being a little more tactile than polite company allows – particularly in a brightly lit pub. Unfortunately, last orders rang, and after a frenzied kiss in the corridor outside the toilets, I was on my way back to my dorm – with a huge smile on my face.