Suresh Menon: The great indoors gets my vote

As you may have deduced from my scribblings over the years, far from being a strong outdoors type full of stories of adventures in the jungles and mountains of the world, I am the weak, indoors type full of stories written by other people named Nabokov or Fitzgerald or, more recently, Nadeem Aslam.

Unlike our ancestors, I neither hunt nor fish, nor do I wrestle animals with my bare hands. The only fish I have caught have been from the supermarket. I suspect there might be little interest in a manual on how to catch fish in a supermarket, which is one of the reasons why there isn’t one.

So what was I doing, you might ask, dressed in the approved manner, with the right degree of stubble on my face preparing for a hike through one of our popular trails? The answer is simply: ‘I don’t know’. Perhaps I had lost a bet. Maybe it was a promise I’d made to a dying grandmother (another reason to always stay away from dying grandmothers). In any case, there – to coin a phrase – was I.

Then there is the matter of shorts. These must reach your knees and be khaki (which made my multicoloured short shorts unique in that company).

Call me an imbecile, but I fail to get the point of the hike. You walk from point A to point B, cutting your legs on some thorns near point C, tripping over a root at point D, losing your way around point E so consistently you begin to think you have spent all your life there. By the time you get to point B, you are irritated, tired, hungry and have just made a mental note never to talk to your best friend again. No point. Driving to work provides the same experience but without the scratches on the legs or the hunger.