at myself for having created such a situation, or, what would probably be even worse, utterly consumed with smug self-regard about this act of ascetic self-sacrifice. And this was why, I reasoned, I should eat my half packet of Marks & Spencer nut and berry mix as quickly as possible, in order to get it out of the way and prevent myself obsessing a moment longer than was absolutely necessary.
And so it was that about ninety minutes into my solo, and perhaps an hour after having set up my tent, I established myself in a comfortable sitting position and began to eat, slowly and with uncharacteristic focus, my half packet of Marks & Spencer nut and berry mix. I found myself relishing in particular the cranberries, which I chewed in a very deliberate and controlled manner, and which seemed to me sweeter and more succulent than I had ever remembered cranberries tasting. It occurred to me then that, despite the popular perception of hunger as the best sauce, boredom was perhaps an even better sauce. I soon began to worry, however, about whether I was getting too much pleasure from the Marks & Spencer nut and berry mix—whether I was drawing the snack out to a ludicrous degree in order to forestall the moment when I would have to properly engage with my situation, namely the total immersion in nature. And so I quickly scoffed the remainder of the mix, chiding myself for using the snack as a means of evading the reality of my situation.
The reality of my situation, to be clear, was that I was stuck there, with nothing to do, for a full day and night, in what was probably the most remote location in the entire British Isles, and so there was nothing for it but to begin in earnest my immersive experience of nature. The problem was that I had no idea how to go about having this experience—whether it was something that would simply happen, as it were naturally, and as a direct consequence of my simply being present in nature, or whether some kind of action was required on my part, the deliberate cultivation of an inner state of openness and receptivity. Perhaps, I thought, the two things were not mutually exclusive. I took off my hiking boots and my alpaca wool hiking socks and walked barefoot around the inner perimeter of my little circle a couple of times, focusing all my attention on the sensation of the grass beneath my feet, which was cool and damp, and not entirely unpleasant, but not exactly outright pleasant either. Andres had at some point mentioned that, while doing Qigong exercises out in nature, he always removed his shoes and socks, because it gave him a sensation of “rootedness” in the place he was in, in the Earth itself. This idea appealed to me in theory, but in practice I found that in my bare feet I was unnecessarily preoccupied by the possibility that I might step on a jagged piece of rock, or God forbid an ants’ nest, and so in a gesture of compromise I put my alpaca socks back on, though not my boots, reasoning that the socks were at least made from entirely natural materials and so would constitute at worst a kind of buffer zone between myself and nature. I then sat down in front of my tent, assumed the lotus position, and passed perhaps a further twenty minutes to half an hour in failing miserably to focus on my breathing.
At one point, I looked down and saw a tiny creature crawling up the length of my forearm. I had no idea what it was, this creature, though for once in my life I felt no immediate inclination to rid myself of an insect’s company. I observed its halting progress toward the crook of my elbow, wondering vaguely what its intentions were, if any, until it suddenly struck me that the creature might well be a tick, and I flicked it off with my forefinger, instinctively rubbing the recently vacated patch of forearm with the palm of my hand. There had throughout the week been a certain amount of low-level hysteria about ticks. We’d been advised to check ourselves for their presence first thing in the morning and last thing at night—because there was a large number of deer in the area, and where there were deer there were probably ticks, and where there were ticks there was the possibility of