THE ASSEKREM CLUB

Last night I dined with a friend and discovered something new - that, like me, he is one of what must be a tiny number of westerners to have visited the hermitage at Assekrem, in the Hoggar mountains of southern Algeria.

The monastery was established by Charles de Foucauld.

This former French Army Officer grew to love and respect the desert and the Tuareg who lived in it. He learned their language, and codified it into a dictionary of translation. He built the hermitage at Assekrem and lived there from 1911 to 1916.

With an outlook like this, it is easy to see how a man might make this choice, as a location for a life of solitary and silent contemplation of the divine. It was the Tuareg also who killed him. A bungled kidnap attempt resulted in his murder.

In Geoffrey Moorhouse's The Fearful Void - an adventure book like no other, based on the preposterous notion of an agoraphobic walking the Sahara from East to West - Moorhouse greets the incumbent hermit at Assekrem - a lineage from Charles de Foucauld. The picture of him shaking hands with the old monk somehow inspired me. Deep in a chest somewhere here at home is a picture of me shaking hands with the self same monk, atop the mountain, by the hermitage at Assekrem.

I was 25. I wanted adventure.

I am 55 now. I still want adventure.

Last night's unexpected formation of the Assekrem Club reconnected me with this. It is something easily lost, left dormant. Perhaps I have left this aspect of my being too passive, too long.

Apart from physical expeditions, it is adventure which led me to start my business, adventure which propelled me to make it distinctive, adventure which led me to be as rebellious as I have been in all my dealings, adventure which led me to choose the home and relationships I have, adventure which interests me and excites me every time it offers me opportunity.

I hereby reconnect.

I hereby get active, adventure seeking.

Bring it on.