We are in Simiane la Rotunde, in France, on the last leg of our holiday. It has been amazing. No, really, amazing.

It is very hot, so we been sitting quietly in the cool of the house. I have been thinking a bit about our adventure in scrubland on Silba. We had found a fine hidden beach and swum and eaten our picnic and it was time to set off for home. It was the hot part of the day, but luckily not as hot as it here now. The walk to the beach had led us on three sides of a square and taken nearly an hour so it seemed reasonable to complete the square on the walk home. It looked as if there was a path and the scrubland was not too thick.

We set off. The path petered out and the scrub got thicker. We fought on and soon it was too late to go back and take the sensible route. We had my compass and Google Maps. We actually used the compass. We took a reading and staggered ten yards or so then checked the reading. A lot of the scrub was myrtle which was fairly forgiving and I claimed useful horticultural knowledge helped to find a way through. It also told me that the juniper we encountered was very prickly, a fact that was soon confirmed as the fierce conifers fought back. The fact that the berries, of which there were many, flavoured gin passed us by. The vegetation got thicker and thicker and thicker. We battled on. At one point I fell backwards and landed on a rock on my coccyx. It hurt. It still hurts now a week later but it is getting better.

At this stage I began to worry a little. We did have phones but would the helicopter find us? I began to picture the headline. I realized they would probably call us an elderly couple although I never think of myself as elderly and Louise is a lot younger than me; but elderly couple I suppose we are.

Eventually we saw signs of habitation, some sort of polythene construction. Thank goodness. We battled the last bit towards it, but it was a false hope. It had been swallowed up by the forest as surely as we soon would be. I began to seriously consider making the phone call and sitting down to await rescue, although extremely uncertain as to what form it would take. But we pressed on. We clambered back over the husk of human evidence and Louise spotted a long patch of sunlight. Could this be the path we were searching for? We fought towards it. The vegetation was now a matted mass of something like brambles. It was a plant I had previously identified as sarsparilla and it is formed of tough twisting thorny strands tangled together. We had to get through it to the light. At this point I came up with my most inventive hallucination. Suppose there’s someone out there out of sight who hears us crashing about in the undergrowth and thinks we are wild boar about to charge and they have a gun and they shoot, to be safe.

Nobody was there. We did make it through and it was the path we were looking for. Later we looked at our Google timeline. It recorded seventeen miles of travel and eight hours of elapsed time. That is certainly what it felt like although other evidence suggested one kilometer and forty-five minutes. We got back safely and told the tale, but I’m not sure any lessons were learned.