Everyone loves David Nicholls’ marvellously tender and humane new novel, You Are Here, in which two lonely, almost middle-aged strangers embark on a very long walk that may (or may not) change both their lives for ever. But perhaps it has a particularly special effect if you read it, as we did, in the Lake District, your eye taking in the same ravishing views as its characters; your heels feeling, at moments, almost as sore and as blistered as theirs do.
Two days before our longed-for holiday in Cumbria, T’s 18-year-old walking boots finally fell apart, and so it was that we were forced to spend a precious morning in the Penrith branch of Go Outdoors, that great and inexpensive purveyor of all things Gore-Tex – and also of the kind of trousers Michael wears in You Are Here, which unzip at the knee to become shorts should the weather suddenly change (“Is this too provocative?” he jokes to Marnie, as he reveals his pasty shins to the fell). I’d been dreading this shopping trip, knowing I would be greeted by hordes of hardcore males in search of new gaiters, but it turned out to be weirdly and unexpectedly enjoyable, and for this I must thank Nicholls, whose book meant we saw everyone and everything with new eyes: here a Michael, wriggling into a highly technical cagoule, and there a Marnie, rolling her eyes at him.
