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travelled round the world. I was always intrigued by his stories, and his adventurous spirit and experiences inspired me. He was also a very keen cyclist and thought nothing of building a bike from scratch and heading off on 100km rides. Having no knowledge of, or interest in, bikes at the time, I was flabbergasted and intrigued.
    As an outdoor enthusiast, Nick took himself off camping before our final year at university. He went to sleep in his tent one night and never woke up. We still don’t know why. It was like a cot death but in an adult. I helped to organise a memorial service for him at the university, and got to know his parents well. They very kindly gave me his travel diaries before I went travelling. These formed an invaluable source of information and inspiration – I copied out the list of equipment he had taken with him. He had been on just the kind of adventures I wanted to go on.
    With Nick’s words in my head and a poem written by my mum pasted in my diary, I set off in November 1998 to Kenya, and from there joined a two-month truck expedition to South Africa. It was the start of a journey that changed the direction my life would take. I would return to the UK not after nine months, as planned, but almost two years later.
    These trips are often defining passages in a person’s life, and mine was no different. I became much more rounded as a person, including physically. It also catalysed the passion I had always had for international development. Not that I had grown up knowing it as that, but as a young child crying over the footage from Ethiopia, I had always been driven by a strong sense of the world’s problems and a desire to do something about them. I organised bring-and-buy sales in Feltwell to raise money for Africa. Now this trip would harden that youthful instinct into something more clearly defined. It did much the same for my love of the outdoors and the natural world. And I met with the concomitant realisation that I was not passionate about commercial law. All in all, it was a journey of self-discovery, and it began, appropriately enough, in Africa.
    The person who played the biggest part in it was a South African girl called Judy, or Jude, as we called her, who was my tent partner on the expedition. She was a couple of years older than me and deeply religious, but what struck me so powerfully was how self-assured she was, comfortable in her own skin and unconcerned with what the rest of us thought of her.
    To begin with I looked askance at her, in the same way everyone else did. She was a pretty girl and knew how to enjoy herself, so she didn’t wear her spirituality in a particularly obvious way, but her views on the world were unlike any I had ever known, and they cut across even those of a thrown-together group of travellers journeying through Africa.
    June’s confidence seemed rock solid, and yet there was not so much as a hint of arrogance. She was a lot of the things that I wasn’t, certainly in terms of knowing who she was and where she sat in the world. She would say things like, ‘I’m not here to make friends – I’ve got enough of those already.’ Her complete indifference to what the others thought of her made a big impression on me. She didn’t care that they laughed when she hugged a tree, which was one of her favourite pastimes. Her view of the natural world was a revelation. To me a tree was just a tree, but she would say, ‘Trees are so old. They are like wise grandfathers and have seen so much. You can feel the life flowing through them.’ We spent New Year at Victoria Falls, and I fell under the spell of a huge, 1,500-year-old baobab tree by the Zambezi river. I sat there painting it for about half an hour. Jude’s love of the natural world reawakened mine.
    But it was that poise of hers that struck me most. She encountered other people on her own terms, and would not be influenced by them. She would never, for example, have succumbed to an eating disorder.