Welcome, one and all, to our pointless voyage!

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen! We extend our warmest welcome to you on your visit to our Long Walk Blog.

We're delighted to take this opportunity to invite you to join us on our mystery journey, touring lands as yet unseen and walking pathways as yet unwalked. It feels like only about a year ago that we were setting off on our trip to Edinburgh through the Great Closed Counties of the North, and yet here we are embarking on a new adventure. An adventure both brave and momentous, to explore the mysteries of the South and our final destination, London.

On the 1st September we shall be walking from South Bank in York, where we live, to South Bank in London, where we'll collapse and bore you all with whinging about blisters and similar unsightly problems that tend to arise on 230-mile walks. We even got a bit carried away the other day and agreed to include in our trip the Millennium Bridges of both cities (even if this will add a bit of extra walking as we'll need to cross the York bridge twice to ensure we don't set off in the wrong direction). In fact, to tantalise and delight you further, on the right-hand side of this very page there's a map you can click on to show you roughly where we're going.

Now, if you were aware of our last adventure, you'll remember that we had quite a distinct purpose for our trip - to end the age-old animosity between York and Scotland, by delivering a petition signed by 100 York residents agreeing that we would not shoot any Scots. Some use that turned out to be - a year later they're talking about separating from England completely. But we digress. This time round, we've got a bit of a problem. We have the shoes, the rucksacks, the clothes, the speakers to enable us to play Total Eclipse of the Heart during those diffiult moments, and even the mini-DVD player to see us through the evenings. All we lack now is a purpose - and that's where you come in.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: we're asking you to devise purposes for us. We currently have no reason at all to do this walk, and yet we seem to be about to do it anyway, so we thought we'd throw it open to the Great British Public(TM) to give us some purposes, some goals, some reasons, some - if you will - quests.

You may, for example, want us to compare and contrast Hatfield Travelodge (near Doncaster) with Hatfield Travelodge (in the South). Perhaps you'd like us to determine once and for all whether the streets of London really are paved with gold. Meybe you need somebody to deliver a bunch of flowers to your Kettering-based maiden aunt who always pesters you about the fact that you really don't visit enough these days. That'll shut her up for a bit. You might want us to present a report on the number of goats sighted between Retford and Grantham, or a paper discussing the possibility of a correlation between geographical latitude and profusion of facial hair. Or maybe you'd just like us to advertise a product, service or good cause of your choice, in a manner of your devising. (The only thing is, it'll need to be possible to do it fairly close to our route, so you may want to have a look at the map on the right. We've got 20-25 miles to cover each day already, so we can't really make too many large detours...)

Let's be clear from the outset, though - we're not entering in to this with any kind of philanthropic spirit. You're going to need to persuade us that your quest is worth doing. Broadly speaking, there needs to be something in it for us, or something in it for someone else. But you needn't (necessarily) pay us in gold bullion or Stella Artois. You could repay our efforts simply by making the quest interesting enough, or by doing something worthwhile yourself in return, or by getting yourself a good toy that we want and promising us a go on it, or even just by making us wish we'd thought of doing it in the first place. You can send your requests via the email link above, or (shortly) on our all-new phone and text hotline.

Please feel free, during our voyage, to make copious use of the various resources you will find on this our blog. The hotline is there for you, the public, and we hope that you will make good use of it by phone or text. On the other hand, if you just want to cheer us on or mock us as our feet start to hurt, please do leave us comments on this blog - you don't need a Blogger account to do so, just click the 'comment' button at the bottom of the post you want to respond to.

The game's afoot!