Richard Hearn on the perils of snack selection

Regular readers (and I’d like to thank you both) might remember that once a year I meet up with old university friends and walk up a hill/mountain. It’s slightly random, but fantastic getting together, reminiscing, catching up, and demonstrating the ageing process against beautiful scenery. This time we crossed water and went to Galway Bay for a 26km walk.

Previously in this column, I’ve concentrated on my lack of preparation food-wise or my excess of pastry products. I’m afraid it’s food-themed again. I felt like I’d learnt that flapjacks were the ultimate hill-climbing snack.
This was based on three years of climbing up hills, or let’s rephrase that, once a year for three years. Forget Kendall Mint Cake – flapjacks are chewy, digestible, long-lasting and with a few raisins in there for moisture – ideal. Am I obsessed? Not wanting flapjacks to scupper my baggage allowance, I left it to the morning of the climb to get them. I even emailed ahead to ensure the stop was in the itinerary.

Trouble is, stopping at the supermarket on the way to ‘base camp’ (I’m calling it ‘base camp’ but it was actually a lovely little carpark by the coast), some treated the shopping trip like an SAS mission – get in there, get the job done, get out – but I’m more of a browser. Suddenly rushing, I made a fateful mistake and opted for a box of granola bars. I also got orange juice.

My mistake with the orange juice was leaving it in the car. My mistake with the granola bars was buying them in the first place. So crunchy, the bite echoed around the three mountains of the Black Head Loop. It should have had ‘Danger of Dehydration’ on the label. Instead I was carrying about the snack version of silica gel, absorbing moisture for miles around. It was apparently an exceptionally dry weekend in Ireland, so perhaps it had some advantages.

In other news, we had some lovely individually-customised ham and cheese sandwiches, the much-promised Peperami was left in the fridge, we had more pork products than you could shake a stick at, including black and white pudding (not an old cabaret act, but breakfast), and our night out started with a very enjoyable pub meal.

Ok, my promise to you. Next year, when we do this sort of thing again, I won’t mention food once. This column should have told you how it was a fantastic weekend with a lot of laughs with great friends. Instead, my last comment is this: when I got back to the Heathrow carpark, the first thing they talked about on the radio was the hosepipe ban. They must have known me (and the leftover granola bars) were back in the country.