It's inevitable that most expatriates lead a double life, moving between cultures, languages, homes and friends. The extent of this hit me during the summer with an alarming fresh air experience in Bulgaria.

I have nothing against fresh air per se. I just don't do it in Bulgaria. At home we enjoy perhaps the freshest air in Europe, on the edge of a Gulf Stream peninsula where the prevailing south-westerlies first hit land and dump their moisture after leaving the Gulf of Mexico. It's certainly fresh, and definitely damp. Days are spent ranging about, Worzel Gummidge-like, axe, chain saw or pruning shears in hand, dodging showers, to be parted from the wellingtons nightly in a semi-surgical exercise. Rare, enforced, trips to the city bring on attacks of claustrophobia.

But here it's city centre. Vitosha has never claimed me to its bosom. Life in Boyana would be a sentence of death. Weekends conjure up the city fleshpots, never the rural escape.

The office moved premises over the summer. For many this meant the beginning of open plan working. Someone, doubtless well-intended, suggested a team-building exercise to ease the transition. I have written in this column before about the terrible experience I had some years ago, when I was sent away to become a Better Person. This metamorphosis involved, inexplicably, jumping out of a tree. It was clearly concocted, at least in part, for the sadistic pleasure of the PE teacher-like zealot who demanded it. So alarm and deja vu competed when I learned that the planned exercise had the ominous subtitle "outward bound." I pitted unavoidable subsequent engagements against a deposition of determined women. The women won. Off we went, my fears growing as the air freshened and the mountains of Maliovitza loomed.

The accommodation was reasonable enough, if you discount a job lot of chicken steaks which would have kept shoe-repairers in raw materials for months, and over-hormoned adolescents on "activity holidays" which appeared to have more to do with discovering each other than the alleged joys of fresh air and exercise.

Our minders appeared with shorts, knapsacks, airs of mystery, glints in their eyes, endless patience and, most alarmingly, quotations from Kurt Hahn. For three days they bonded us together with impossible group tasks. The office cashier took spontaneous charge and kept ear-piercing time like a re-incarnated Phoenician galley slave mistress as we tried to move huge pieces of wood to which we were all physically attached; death-by-pine-clad-ravine was avoided during a roped-together blind-folded night exercise only by keeping a firm grip on a librarian's thigh. And then there was the baffling and ultimately inconclusive Long March. Eight hours in the mountains with elderly maps, compasses and "clues" involving long-changed topographical features, wrapped up in the sweltering humidity like a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia to avoid sunburn and being lunch for ravenous horse-flies. Rations were supplemented by wild strawberries, raspberries and blueberries scavenged from mother nature. My small group proved endlessly forgiving when I completely and confidently misread the map and led them on a very long and very wild goose chase. I caressed the tarmac when finally reunited with man-made routes of communication.

Then, at the end of day three, the zealots produced the tree and said "Jump out of it." Why, oh why, do they do it? The accountant, clearly extremely nervous, was the first to climb the wretched thing. Then out of it she jumped. And if she was prepared to do so, the argument went...

I have now jumped out a tree twice in the course of my professional duties. My colleagues maintain that the experience was enormously enjoyable and beneficial. They returned more or less bonded. But I swear that henceforward I will keep trees for my other life where I can at least defend myself from them with the chainsaw. In that life I do the threatening, not them...