DAY 201 - AIGLE TO MONTREUX: 9.8 MILES (19,600 STEPS)

9 November, 2011

9.8 miles (Total: 1967.3 miles) 19,600 steps (Total: 4,239,201 steps)

A shorter walk today reflecting the fact that I had meant to finish the previous day at Bex, but had just missed the train to Montreux and so strode on a further 10km to Aigle. It worked out well as this was Xuelin’s (pic) last day of her visit on behalf of the Support Team back in London and there was so much paperwork to do – it is one of the hidden aspects of the walk that I am still a serving, albeit unpaid, member of the House of Lords and have lots of correspondence to respond to and forms to fill in.

I have never been a very good delegator of work and I am a hopeless manager of people so, although I have some wonderful support available to me, I tend to do things myself rather than take the time to explain to someone else. There is something in me which recoils from asking people to do any of my work whereas I am more than willing to undertake any number of tasks for others. This is one of the reasons why I am unsuited to leadership roles, but have tended to perform well as a support act to others. This weakness is made all the more obvious when I am physically limited as I am at the moment, but it is difficult to change a lifelong failing even when there is an acute need.

One of the more urgent pieces of paperwork were the forms for my claim for medical insurance to cover the £3,500 cost of my 24 hour stay in hospital. Filling in the forms, I realise how absolutely privileged we are to have our National Health Service and are therefore spared the experience of having to search through our luggage overseen by an administrator to find a credit card with sufficient available credit in order for payment to be secured before treatment is commenced. As I have said before, the treatment I received was exceptional but I do think the NHS is one of the most civilising and humane institutions of our culture, and the more I see of the alternatives, the more I am convinced of its value.

We take a walk along the beautiful lakeside on our way to the railway station, Xuelin bound for Geneva airport and myself bound for Aigle. As we walk, we come across a statue to Freddie Mercury – I must admit that I had not realised that he was Asian, born in Zanzibar he was a Parsi from Gujarat. His family fled London following the revolution in Zanzibar and that is where his interest and extraordinary talent for music began to flourish. Freddie Mercury had a home and built a recording studio on the hills above Montreux and there is now an official ‘Freddie Mercury Memorial Day’ on the 1^st June each year in Montreux. Last year, the tributes were led by the Bearpark and Esh Colliery brass band from Durham – small world, great entertainer.

DAY 199 - MARTIGNY TO AIGLE: 20.2 MILES (40,400 STEPS)

7 November, 2011

20.2 miles (Total 1957.5 miles) 40,400 steps (Total: 4,219,601)

After a couple of days rest in Lausanne I hit the road again from Martigny up to Aigle, where a  wrong turn out of St Maurice adds a frustrating 2.5 miles onto the journey.

In Lausanne I visit the splendid Olympic Museum with first class exhibits and great free access to wi-fi. I spend a long time in the correspondence and stamp sections, not just because they were free, but because it was quite amazing to see the personal correspondence about the Games going back to Baron Coubertain in the nineteenth century. Reading through the correspondence made me realise the significant challenges that these founding fathers of the modern games had to overcome in order to secure the participation of member states in the early years of the competition. I can immediately see why they were nervous about the involvement of political and religious groups for no other reason than the fact that they tend to see themselves as superior to other religious and political groups. If we tried to establish the Games again, then there would be one Games for the ‘Western democracies’, another for ‘Islamic theocracies’, and another for ‘Communist autocracies’. The great achievement is that these founding fathers have managed to unite every nation on earth under the Olympic banner, which is inspiring.

The visit to the museum was made all the more enjoyable because of the kind welcome I received from

Veronika Henriod and her colleague Julia after Xuelin explained to them the purpose of my walk. I asked whether there was a section of the museum given over to the Olympic Truce and was surprised to find that there was only a small panel in a temporary exhibition called ‘Hope’ (see pic). It would seem to me that the Olympic museum is the perfect place to help people learn about the importance of the Olympic truce, especially if the truce is more widely implemented at London 2012 and beyond. Fortunately, the museum is having a makeover next year and so there is an early opportunity to make space for the Olympic Truce should the IOC wish to. I think I might mention this to the IOC President when I meet him next week, although I can already picture his eyes rolling heavenward at yet more outside interference.

 The curators of the museum were kind and invited me to sign the ‘Golden Book’, which is ordinarily reserved for Olympians who visit the museum – I felt unworthy to sign alongside such sporting heroes, but took it as recognition for the truce rather than for an aging one-armed, unathletic, unknown, and unelected politician.

DAY 196 - SION TO MARTIGNY: 17.5 MILES (35,000 STEPS)

4 November, 2011

17.5 miles (Total: 1938.8 miles) 35,000 steps (4,179,201 steps)

The end of quite a week. I check out of my hotel in Brig, which has been my base for four days, and drop my rucksack in a locker at Sion station. I set off for Martigny with a spring in my step for a couple of reasons – first, it is the end of a long straight of around 85km down the Rhone Valley from where I turn north again and head up to Lake Geneva and second, because Xuelin Black from my Support Group was coming out and meeting me in Lausanne.

I pounded through the miles, not stopping for a coffee or a drink until I reached Martigny. Such long marches, especially down long straight roads, are hard going quite frankly because they are boring even though   I was in the middle of the Alps with Mount Blanc on one side and the Eiger on the other – I couldn’t see them of course because of the cloud cover.

I spent a large part of the day trying to work out where I would cross the ‘2012 miles’ landmark on my walk, would it be Freiberg or would it be Berne. I get a call from Ana in the Office of the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) asking if I could meet the President on Tuesday 15 November in Lausanne. I had been concerned that it might not be possible to meet with Jacques Rogge again (we had met in Zagreb) because the IOC in general and LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) had been lukewarm at best about the walk.

I can understand this; they are great people organising a great event and they tend to get irritated by people who ‘freelance’ or seek to politicise, rather than commercialise the Games. They have a point: I am a politician and I am making a political statement, namely that it is a problem when 193 member states of the UN sign up to a resolution calling for a period of peace and reconciliation and they don’t implement it.

When ten out of fifteen member states on the Security Council decided to intervene in Libya we were able to find £1 billion and mobilise a naval and an air force over a weekend to enforce the resolution. My campaign simply asks the question why we cannot deploy the same resources with the same sense of urgency behind a resolution for peace as we do behind a resolution for war. This makes the Olympic organisers flinch, but the Olympic ideal is not the possession and play thing of a Committee, or a government. It was a dream, an ideal, a gift which was given to humanity by the ancient Greeks and remains available to us all if we choose to accept it.