With a bit of huffing, puffing and expert manoeuvring I’ve managed to have a decent wash from my bowl of pleasantly hot water. The air brushes over my naked skin, chilling the droplets of water clinging to it. Outside, the temperature is plummeting quickly with the sinking of the sun. The lurid anorak is going to come in very useful. The light is fading fast too. And I miss Jake. He used to like to dry my back for me, lying next to me on the bed, caressing me gently with a towel, kissing the places he’d dried—did he do this all the time he was with Neve? I shake away the thought and give myself a good therapeutic and very unromantic scrubbing with my specially designed trekking towel, which is about six inches square but will soak up an entire bucket of water if required—something like that. The luxury of a change of clothes is something I’m denied, so I pull on my dusty trousers once again just as someone bangs a spoon against a pan to signal that dinner is served.

Two kerosene lamps burn in the bright green tent that doubles as our dining room and night-time accommodation for our happy band of porters and kitchen crew. Most of the party are already assembled and tucking into plates of popcorn, which seems an incongruous thing out here in the middle of nowhere—my only other experience of popcorn is in the massive multiplex cinemas at home, but it appears that it’s a local delicacy around here. The sky is blacker than I’ve ever seen, daubed with milky bands of stars. I now know why the Green Party complains about Britain being saturated by light pollution. However, I’m very glad that the young man at the Outdoor Shop equipped me with a hands-free torch that straps to my head; otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to see beyond the end of my nose—and as I have quite a small nose, that isn’t very far at all. I might look like a miner, but at least I won’t fall in a hole. This man has thought of my every need—some I didn’t know I’d have; I think I’m going to ask him to marry me the minute I get home. Assuming, of course, that I make it home alive after the next four weeks and they’re not just shipping bits of me back in a box.

I follow the unsteady beam of my torch and take up my place on a little camp stool at the table set for the twelve of us. Two of the porters sit near the tent and one beats gently on a drum while the other sings a traditional song. The wood of the campfire hisses and spits showers of bright orange embers into the night like fireworks.