When I think of David Balfour – the boy in the book –  I think of a 16-year-old who’s lost his parents, his uncle has tried to kill him, he’s been kidnapped by pirates, there’s a been a gunfight, a shipwreck and now he’s trudging across this alien and unfriendly landscape.

‘Kidnapped’ really is a great read for anyone who’s making that journey from child to adult; that period of your life when you feel very isolated, that you’re on your own, nobody understands you, and you have to discover for yourself about other people, realising (often painfully) that the world is not black and white, that there are not straightforwardly good or bad people, but that there are shades of gray and that we align ourselves to friends who are sometimes noble, sometimes feeble, sometimes socially acceptable and sometimes lawless.

I am thinking about my friends and family a lot whilst I am walking across Mull. I am already wondering why I separated myself from them and chose to take on this crazy mission.

And now the weather is turning and the rain will soon be upon me. Things are definitely going to get harder along the trail. But they don’t necessarily need to be lonelier. Not if anyone out there chose to travel with me for a bit…

*Please note all the Kidnapped posts have been transferred here from the original blog at https://timwright.typepad.com/kidmapper which no longer exists.

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