Sunday 15th August

Morning comes, as does the unspeakably dry mouth caused by the late night Mighty Meaty. I still don't regret it though, even as I run to the kitchen and down about a litre of apple and blackcurrant squash. Inevitably, it's almost impossible to get back to sleep, so I lie in bed and fiddle with my phone for a while before reading a bit of Stewart Lee's book How I Escaped My Certain Fate, which came in the post yesterday. After a while it becomes clear that the day must begin – especially as K and I have planned to do a Big Walk. We haven't done a Big Walk for a while, again because the last few weekends have been pre-planned for us and because, mostly, we've been a bit lazy when we have been here. The plan is to walk to Hampstead and get a roast from a pub for lunch, so we find a cunning-looking route online and head out around midday.

The route takes us up through Crouch End, past Archway, across Highgate Hill and down past the Whittington Hospital, before dumping us at the bottom of Parliament Hill. Neither of us have been this way before, so along the way the route looks worryingly residential, though when we arrive at the park we are both marvelling at how easy the walk is – especially considering how awkward it can be to get to Hampstead by public transport (and hence why we don't go there very often).

We walk up Parliament Hill and check out the views, being sure to pick out the just-completed Heron Tower to the left of the Gherkin and the in-construction Shard building, which is set to forever alter and dominate the skyline. K isn't as interested in this as I am, so we carry on walking in a general northerly direction – mostly in search of the lunch we both now feel in deep need of. Hampstead Heath is not a particularly easy place to exit at the top, we find, and in the end find ourselves turning left and right almost at random, before eventually I get frustrated and make a beeline straight up the hill, towards where I'm sure the road must be. We scramble through the woods and somehow find ourselves on the road into Hampstead, feeling like we've escaped an almost-certain midday, mid-summer Blair Witch Project scenario.

We stagger, exhausted and hungry, into Hampstead itself, in search of a pub that will sell us a roast dinner in this oddly quiet, wealthy enclave of North London. We find pubs that will – but not for under £15. Bugger that, say we from the lowlands. No pub roast in the world is worth more than a tenner. Instead we opt for plan B – grabbing some sandwiches from the little Tesco's and going back to the Heath for a little picnic. With less than ten pounds spent between us, we battle back through the woods armed with food, laughing at the ripped-off rich folk as we scurry past them like rats having raided the kitchen.

We sit and greedily stuff ourselves with our picnic before preparing to head back down the hill through areas of descending wealth and status: from Hampstead to Highgate Village, to Crouch End, to Turnpike Lane. However, before we have a chance to get moving, a vicious bastard wasp comes along and stings K on the back of the neck. It doesn't seem in a hurry to fly off either, so she has to flick the wretched thing away. I offer sympathy – but not before I've Twitpic-ed the already hugely-swollen sting.

We walk along the north edge of the Heath towards Highgate, and eventually make our way out of one of the few, unsignposted gates. Following the long, busy road past Highgate School we walk up to Highgate village and I load up on the requisite amount of Diet Coke I feel I'll need to complete the journey. By the time we've walked down the steep hill to Crouch End, we're both thoroughly exhausted and ready to get home. The last few steps to the front door feel like a huge effort and my feet are throbbing – and by the time I've kicked my shoes off and crashed on the sofa there's no way I'm moving for the rest of the day. I get out the computer and amuse myself by plotting the walk on a website that lets you do such things, and work out that we did 10 miles, far more than the 3 or 4 we'd originally intended. I know this is hardly an epic hike, but it's enough of a tramp around the hard streets of North London to register as effort expended – and we spend the rest of the day vegging out in front of the telly.