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Last week Andrew gave some great recommendations for summer reading. At the risk of self-promotion let me add another recommendation. Sometimes it’s good to get away from it all. Life gets busy and it feels like everything is crowding in. It can be hard to think straight, to see straight. Sometimes it’s good to get a completely different view. During a time of sabbatical leave I spent two weeks hiking a section of the GR10 path in the French Pyrenees. This is a famous long-distance route that traverses the Pyrenean mountains from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. To walk the entire route normally takes six weeks or more. For me, just a two-week stage was enough, but what a two weeks it was: two weeks of beautiful scenery, over high mountain passes, still carrying snow in mid-summer, and down into glorious valleys, filled with spectacular flowers. The Pyrenees feel remote and most days I didn’t even cross a tarred road. The absence of cars, shops and the normal stuff of life was…