Warming up in Wellow

And talking of plans, in what way could super-civilised Bath be a suitable training ground for the rigours of the Pyrenees? Great for shopping; yes. Theatre; definitely. But col cracking? Dites moi plus.

My cunning plan of visiting friends while they are away on holiday so as to gain free accommodation and eat their raspberries has brought me to Chris and Sue's pad in Wellow, just outside Bath. It's a very des res in a very des village which sports just one pub and a shop that, as far as I can tell, is only open by appointment. And the weather has been beautiful: summer has arrived and the raspberries are ripening a treat.

How, I hear you ask, could this possibly be good preparation for anything other than an extremely comfortable retirement?

For one thing, Wellow is in a communications black hole: no mobile phone signal of any kind and a router password that won't let me past, ie no internet connection either. It's a salutary lesson in how most of the world lives, including the bit I shall (did I say that?) be going to. I can't do blogging, googlemaps, emails, texts, mobile calls, or indeed look anything up on the interweb. If I want to check my emails, I have to cycle up the nearest hill until I hear the little 'you've got mail' ping on my phone that announces I am within range of a transmitter. I then freewheel back into Wellow, read and answer the mail before cycling up the hill again, carefully listening for the whoosh sound of mail being sent. It's all pretty much done at a pace that Jane Austin would have understood but with less ironic social comedy.

Did I mention the hills? Like Rome before it, Somerset's own Aquae Sulis was built on seven large mounds of water-filtering Jurassic limestone. And Wellow, bless its middle-class socks, seems to have followed suit with no thought given by its founders as to how its site would affect its future mobile phone reception. In order to reach Bath one has to climb two hills. And these are not just hills - they are hand-crafted, beautifully scenic, lung-sapping M&S hills, chock full of bends and false summits that – reader take note - are just as big on the return journey.

According to my fancy new satnav (see under 'boy's toys' on previous post) the highest of these beasts is over 200m! Even allowing for the trivial fact that that I'm not starting at sea level and that some hills are not as high as others, my legs tell me that the total climb each time I pop to and from Bath to buy a loaf of bread-that-is-not-just-a-loaf-of-bread etc from the wonderful, and wonderfully named, Thoughtful Bread Company, is over 750m. That's seven hundred and fifty metres people! This is, as it happens, almost exactly the height you have to climb to cross – to take a not-completely random example - the Col du Portillon on the border between Spain and France (see here if you don't believe me).

How do I know this arcane truth? Well there is one final way in which Wellow has proved to be good preparation for whatever lies ahead: Chris is a map addict and has a treasure trove of atlases and maps that have been quietly feeding my imagination, as the TBC have been quietly nourishing my body. Like a three-seed granary loaf in an airing cupboard, some sort of plan is slowly growing.