Life Without Limits, A (5 page)

In my third year at university there was no bulimia. The rational side of me took over, as I realised what damage I was doing to myself. I started to put on a bit of weight, but most of all, emotionally I felt a huge weight lift. I was no longer constrained by this mental chokehold.

Pressure is a necessary evil if you want to achieve. It brings with it great stress, but you deal with it, and the redemption comes when you achieve things as a result. It can also be debilitating though, on a day-to-day level, especially if its benefits are illusory. The trick is to understand which pressures are necessary and which ones are the dangerous decoys, the ones that suck the life out of you for no reward. In ridding myself of bulimia, I had identified one of those and cut it out. I wish I could say that I had beaten the emotional urge to push my body to extremes in search of some self-devised notion of perfection. That was to lie dormant for the time being. But, physically, I had beaten bulimia.

The alleviation of the mental pressure was similar to when Brett Sutton started to coach me as a triathlete, nearly ten years later. He lobbied me incessantly to stop thinking and just to follow his orders without question, to trust that he knew what was best and to channel all my energies into the programme he had devised. Surrendering control like that was incredibly difficult for me to do, but when I did let go it felt the same way – like a weight being lifted.

Mentally it is hard coping with the weight of expectation I put on myself. Mentally it is hard trying to be the best the whole time. And I don’t know who I’m trying to prove myself to. There is something inside me – not a voice exactly, but a deep-seated compulsion – that strives for perfection. But it’s my own version of perfection, not to be perfect per se but just to be the best that I can be. That can lead to unnatural and excessive pressure. Sometimes I have difficulty being in the now, being present. I constantly worry, am I making the most out of this, am I making the most out of this, instead of just accepting and enjoying what
is
.

It does, though, make the pride and euphoria all the more intense when you do achieve something special. For me, that achievement came in the shape of a first-class degree in geography. I achieved the highest grade ever recorded in the department, and was awarded the title of University Scholar, 1998. My dissertation was published in a journal. When my family came to the graduation ceremony, I felt confident that I had followed my father’s advice to make the most of every opportunity. With so many good friends graduating the same day, it was a very special occasion.

But the passing-out ceremony that stands out in my mind was the girls’ trip to Magaluf that I went on that summer with three of my best friends from university. It was the apotheosis of my fledgling drinking career, and remains so to this day. Certainly, it bore precious little resemblance to the life I lead now, or indeed did then, even after I had embraced drinking as a pastime. My friend Emily broke her leg on the first night going up the steps to a nightclub, and spent the rest of the week in plaster. Not that it stopped her, or the rest of us. It was a week of the purest debauchery – drinking, sunbathing, drinking, meeting boys, drinking and drinking. Self-control was abandoned for the week, and I have to say it felt good. I had just achieved more than I could ever have imagined at university, so I had earned this time off the leash. I think of that week with a special fondness, maybe because I have never, before or since, just let myself go in such a gratuitous fashion. I did enjoy it, but it could never have lasted.

3

In Search of Myself

My initial plan after university was to become a lawyer. At the time, that was what I thought I wanted.

Lovell White Durrant accepted me on a week-long work placement in their London offices that summer. I found the work interesting and challenging, and I enjoyed the social side. Working in the City was novel. I had never lived in London before. As always, I was hugely enthusiastic and determined to make the most of this opportunity.

But I would be lying if I said I was particularly enthralled by corporate law. And during that week I found myself working on cases in defence of big companies whose causes I wouldn’t have chosen – mobile phone companies, for example, who were contesting claims about the health effects of their devices. That did sow a seed of doubt, but generally I was happy with the path I had chosen. I am analytical and thorough and I love meeting people, so the law seemed to be a good fit. I have a high boredom threshold, too. All of which pointed towards a potentially successful career.

Lovells offered me a two-year training contract. First, though, I would have to take a law conversion course, so I applied to Nottingham University and was accepted for the start of the following academic year. I had a good twelve months to fill, so I decided to go travelling.

All summer, I had worked as a lifeguard at Centre Parcs and Thetford Sports Centre – not exactly
Baywatch
, but it was a wage. I was saving money more than I was saving lives, put it that way. After I’d cashed in a few Premium Bonds, and with some money Mum and Dad had given me for my eighteenth birthday, I managed to gather together about £3,000 for my trip.

My preparations didn’t stop at that, though. I had a friend at Birmingham called Nick Wellings, who also happened to be a fellow native of Norfolk, hailing from Norwich. He had taken a gap year before university and travelled round the world. I was always intrigued by his stories, and his adventurous spirit and experiences inspired me. He was also a very keen cyclist and thought nothing of building a bike from scratch and heading off on 100km rides. Having no knowledge of, or interest in, bikes at the time, I was flabbergasted and intrigued.

As an outdoor enthusiast, Nick took himself off camping before our final year at university. He went to sleep in his tent one night and never woke up. We still don’t know why. It was like a cot death but in an adult. I helped to organise a memorial service for him at the university, and got to know his parents well. They very kindly gave me his travel diaries before I went travelling. These formed an invaluable source of information and inspiration – I copied out the list of equipment he had taken with him. He had been on just the kind of adventures I wanted to go on.

With Nick’s words in my head and a poem written by my mum pasted in my diary, I set off in November 1998 to Kenya, and from there joined a two-month truck expedition to South Africa. It was the start of a journey that changed the direction my life would take. I would return to the UK not after nine months, as planned, but almost two years later.

These trips are often defining passages in a person’s life, and mine was no different. I became much more rounded as a person, including physically. It also catalysed the passion I had always had for international development. Not that I had grown up knowing it as that, but as a young child crying over the footage from Ethiopia, I had always been driven by a strong sense of the world’s problems and a desire to do something about them. I organised bring-and-buy sales in Feltwell to raise money for Africa. Now this trip would harden that youthful instinct into something more clearly defined. It did much the same for my love of the outdoors and the natural world. And I met with the concomitant realisation that I was not passionate about commercial law. All in all, it was a journey of self-discovery, and it began, appropriately enough, in Africa.

The person who played the biggest part in it was a South African girl called Judy, or Jude, as we called her, who was my tent partner on the expedition. She was a couple of years older than me and deeply religious, but what struck me so powerfully was how self-assured she was, comfortable in her own skin and unconcerned with what the rest of us thought of her.

To begin with I looked askance at her, in the same way everyone else did. She was a pretty girl and knew how to enjoy herself, so she didn’t wear her spirituality in a particularly obvious way, but her views on the world were unlike any I had ever known, and they cut across even those of a thrown-together group of travellers journeying through Africa.

June’s confidence seemed rock solid, and yet there was not so much as a hint of arrogance. She was a lot of the things that I wasn’t, certainly in terms of knowing who she was and where she sat in the world. She would say things like, ‘I’m not here to make friends – I’ve got enough of those already.’ Her complete indifference to what the others thought of her made a big impression on me. She didn’t care that they laughed when she hugged a tree, which was one of her favourite pastimes. Her view of the natural world was a revelation. To me a tree was just a tree, but she would say, ‘Trees are so old. They are like wise grandfathers and have seen so much. You can feel the life flowing through them.’ We spent New Year at Victoria Falls, and I fell under the spell of a huge, 1,500-year-old baobab tree by the Zambezi river. I sat there painting it for about half an hour. Jude’s love of the natural world reawakened mine.

But it was that poise of hers that struck me most. She encountered other people on her own terms, and would not be influenced by them. She would never, for example, have succumbed to an eating disorder. Her sympathy for anyone who did would have known no bounds, but to go down that road herself would never have occurred to her. That serenity rubbed off on me. By then I was well into my ‘grungy’ stage, having moved on from the short skirts and crop tops of my first two years at university, so I was receptive to her relaxed outlook on life. And throughout my time away I never felt at all threatened by my own affinity for eating disorders. I put on weight in Africa. There wasn’t much physical activity, but there were a lot of the local Eat-Sum-More biscuits. And we did. In my combat trousers and trainers, I felt fine about gaining weight.

When we reached Cape Town, I spent three weeks travelling in South Africa with Jude and two other close friends I had made, Aline and Luanne. From there I flew to Auckland, where I rediscovered my love for trekking (I was an enthusiastic participant in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme at school) and met one of the loves of my life, Steve. Sadly, we weren’t together very long, but we packed a lot into it.

After two months in New Zealand I flew to Sydney. I had a work visa, so I was always going to base myself there for a while, although four months turned into eleven. I ended up in a three-bedroom flat in Bondi, which I shared with eleven others, including my cousin Tim and our mate Ian, or Easy, as he is known. It probably wasn’t a lifestyle conducive to a legal career, but I managed to wangle my way into a law firm in Sydney, Heidtman and Co., where I worked as a paralegal and secretary. My boss was a wonderful woman called Penny Cable. She was a partner, and very sophisticated and glamorous, always immaculately turned out. We hit it off from the start, but, as much as I enjoyed working for her, I was increasingly plagued by doubt about law as a career. I’d written to Lovells, asking to defer the start of my contract – and hence my course in Nottingham – by a year. They’d agreed, and so I had a bit of time to enjoy Sydney, procrastinate and continue to mull things over.

It dawned on me that one of the reasons I had chosen law was just to be able to tell people that I was a solicitor. It was a way of channelling my academic qualifications into a suitably respectable vocation. All that work I had put in at school and university would be vindicated by a high-flying job that labelled me as being somebody.

Now I was perceiving the folly of such reasoning. ‘I need to address some of the flaws in my personality,’ I wrote in my diary. ‘One of them is my tendency always to try to gain the approval and appreciation of others. I guess it’s a reflection of my lack of self-confidence – needing constant reassurance. Strange, because I am sure that that’s not the perception most people actually have of me.’

A year on from the completion of my degree, I was starting to miss the sense of achievement that comes from working hard. I was missing the creativity and the learning. I missed using my mind. About that time, my grandfather Harry, aged ninety-three, published his memoirs,
The End is My Beginning
. Would I ever feel inclined to do the same if I pursued a career that I’d chosen as a means of validating myself in the eyes of other people? ‘When you are lying on your deathbed,’ I wrote, ‘you don’t wish for more time in front of a computer.’

I sought advice from various friends – Penny, Jude, Jon Sadler. Jude sent me an email from South Africa, in which she wrote: ‘You are changing and becoming a different person to the one you were when you left home. I think you should keep on travelling until you find your
passion
in this world. Don’t panic about the time you are using now, it is all necessary for you to grow as a person and to get to know yourself in different circumstances. There are so many opportunities! Decide where you want to go and just do it.’

She signed off, ‘Love, Mum’, as she always did, and still does.

I wondered whether I should abandon law altogether. The victory that my heart was winning over my head (which still maintained I should secure my qualification and keep my options open) was the main reason, but I don’t deny that the lifestyle in Sydney was also encouraging me away from the conservative option.

Those eleven months were a very special time for me. I tuned myself into the vibrant social scene. I was heavily into alternative music, particularly punk rock, and I went to countless gigs and open-air festivals. I drank and I ate as much as I ever had done.

I was putting on more and more weight, though, and unlike in Africa, it was starting to play on my mind. For the first couple of months in Sydney, Steve was off on his travels. While he was away I resolved to stop eating junk, lose a bit of weight and look good for him when he came back in June. When he did, we headed off up the east coast in a clapped-out old car we called Ballarat. Then, at the end of July, Steve left Sydney for good. We broke up, and I was devastated. I started running, just to take my mind off it.