SETTING out from Calais on April 16 after a stint volunteering with Care4Calais, the walk’s route would be through seven countries to reach Istanbul and then a flight to Amman for a short hike to Jordan’s border with Palestine at the Allenby (King Hussein) Bridge crossing to the West Bank.

Despite some nasty blisters, a heatwave and encounters with feral dogs in the Balkans, I’ve reached Thessaloniki in north-east Greece after 18 weeks and getting on for 1,500 miles of walking. I hope to reach Istanbul by the end of September or early October, and the West Bank soon after.

The idea for the walk came from reading Justin Butcher's 2018 book Walking to Jerusalem, the account of the 2017 walk, from Canterbury to Jerusalem, by a group from the Amos Trust to mark the centenary of the infamous Balfour Declaration, a particularly perfidious act of British imperialism which laid the basis for over a century of displacement for the Palestinian people.