At first, I believed it was just about climbing a mountain, which I duly did one year later. A major achievement in itself. Relatively unfit, with only a single year of hard won sobriety under my belt, I somehow reached the summit of Ben Nevis. The cloud was thick, obscuring the view, but I still knew I was starting to get somewhere, I just didn’t know where that somewhere was yet.

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I can’t blame Cheryl entirely for my desire to return to the wild, for I first heard those whispers in my ear long before she came along. Quiet at first, they were easy to ignore, explain away as those doubts, we all have from time to time. But as is often the case with these things, these voices don’t tend to go away quietly, they exploit every opportunity they can to speak louder and ring in your ears when all you want is silence.  And sometimes those voices scare me, they say things I never