What do real tennis and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro have in common? Not a great deal, you would think, but Vincent Purton, the 39-year-old managing director of Daiwa Europe's debt origination desk is spending the first week of February heading towards the summit of the Tanzanian mountain, inspired, as he puts it, "by the rather arcane game of real tennis that I play. The professional who coaches us at Hampton Court suggested it last year, and I didn't need much persuading."
So put aside any theories that he's been driven to it by the rough year Daiwa Europe had last year; instead he describes it as "one of the more visible signs of my own particular mid-life crisis, no doubt". He is also doing it to raise money for a UK charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
It's not the first time Purton's been to the region - Africa falls under his remit at Daiwa - nor the first time he's scaled a mountain: he climbed Mount Kenya 15 years ago, and insists that was a harder task. "We had a real climb as we reached the summit, but Kilimanjaro is best described as a stiff walk."