By March 2021, the grip of the Winter Coronavirus lockdown was beginning to free up. I was looking to break out some trips to the seaside again. I picked this coastline partly because earlier visits hadn’t done West Sussex much justice. And also because the area is relatively easy to do as a day trip. Bognor was to be the jumping-off point, because I had never been there at all. My most recent visit to the stretch of coast had been Littlehampton further east. The only redeeming feature of that dull little town on a day in 2015 was a reasonable plate of grub at Osca’s Fish and Chips and a wonderful sky full of brooding thunderclouds heading over to France. Being back on the coast trail for the first time since the previous November gave me a preposterous sense of giddy freedom. The 97 days of Covid-19 restrictions from December to April had felt merciless. Apart from a brief trip in to London for my first Covid jab in February I had not left Berkhamsted since an early-December work
“That might be nice”, said Mrs A. “Find a nice little B&B up on the South Downs for an overnight stop”. Bryn had e-mailed me a link to a British Heart Foundation page about a London to Brighton walk over a Summer weekend in 2015. It did indeed sound appealing. Tough going, but over a couple of days, probably achievable. A short stroll to the beach... On further investigation, the challenge seemed a tad tougher than Mrs A and I had initially thought. The idea was to depart from south London on Saturday morning and arrive in Brighton on Sunday afternoon, having trekked through the night. BHF had filed this little trip under their ‘extreme events’ section, described as ‘The ultimate walking challenge. Up to 30 hours to walk 100k from London to Brighton’. It was either trepidation about rambling across Box Hill in the dark with only a head torch to stave off an 80 foot plunge that finally put Mrs A off; or the prospect of me, Bryn, Ad and Ben talking about cricket averages for a day