Second- HAND socks and snowy TOPS

Tramping can teach you a lot. Lessons I recently learned include: 1) planning a 17-day trip involving significant tops travel in the Kawekas in June is almost certain to have a failure point; 2) spending the night in a hut so cold that your sleeping bag freezes won’t necessarily end in death, but equally sleeping beneath two swastikas, some devil worship symbols and a penis drawn on a bunk is not pleasant; and 3) hunters come in all sorts, from drunk and dangerous to sensible and understated. Also, 4) it’s probably a good idea to avoid tramping in the dark by headlamp in popular munter-hunter areas, and 5) your happiness is generally relative to your expectations and where you sit at any given time on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The company I work for has an unusual policy around annual leave: in order to encourage people to actually use up their holiday entitlement, if you use more than 20 days in a year and have less than five