So—all of life is here. That leaves poor old me, Lyssa Allen—unlucky in work, unlucky in love. Depressed, heart-broken single and child-free zone. Although I’m alone, in another way I’m feeling strangely comforted to be travelling with this mish-mash of humanity.

We finish the chicken—all of it. The plates are so clean that they probably won’t need to wash them and then Mr Bom brings us a metal dish of tinned fruit salad—the one with the livid red cocktail cherries in it that everyone’s grandmother used to serve. And we all tuck in because it tastes so much better here with the Himalayas in the background and because some poor sod has carried it on his back all the way here.

The Sherpas finish us off completely with steaming mugs of Nepalese black tea which tastes wonderful—smoky and refreshing. Now that we’re all too fat to move, we waddle outside to sit by the campfire so that the porters can move into the dining tent and bed down for the night.

Tony and Tania head straight back to their tent because they clearly can’t wait to get down to it, but the rest of us assemble round the fire, leaning into the warmth. There are some mats on the ground to shield us from the chill and I’m gratified to see that my lovely guide takes his place by my side again. I’m not deluding myself, but it could be the fact that I’m single, relatively young and not completely barking that he’s finding being joined at the hip to me quite attractive. And I’m certainly not complaining.

The foothills nestling round us form a magnificent backdrop to the camp; the night is cold and inordinately still. A couple of the porters join us and quietly continue to sing traditional songs, blending one into the other with only a modicum of ‘what shall we sing next’ discussion. It’s sad, isn’t it, that we Brits don’t have much in the way of tradition left? Unless, of course, you count Morris dancers, and the less I say about grown men jumping around with bells on their legs and hitting each other with fake pigs’ bladders the better. Most of us would be hard-pushed to know the words to the National Anthem. And it’s not exactly a rousing tune at the best of times, is it? I blame it on the advent of television that none of us sit round the piano singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ anymore. And the poorer we are for it.