Walking

Giving pretentious books as presents is a longstanding tradition among my brothers and me.

Last year, my brother bought me The Art of Mindful Walking by Adam Ford for my birthday. It may have been chosen for me on the back of my raving about a comparable book, Walking by Erling Kagge, which I’d got for my other brother for Christmas. I’d read Walking before giving it to him, careful to avoid tell-tale bending. He’d recently completed the Camino, and I thought he might be up for a rugged meditation on putting one foot in front of the other.

Kagge is a Norwegian adventurer who walked to the South Pole alone and looks like, well, like this…

He talks a lot about how walking – rather than using up time that we could save by taking faster transport – slows down the world. It gives time.

The Art of Mindful Walking wasn’t so engaging, but it pointed me to a book I’d never heard of, Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Apparently, this was the second part of a trilogy which recounted the nineteen year old Fermor’s journey from Rotterdam to Constantinople in 1934, entirely on foot. It sounded like my cup of tea, so I ordered it. Then I was given the first of the trilogy this Christmas, A Time of Gifts.

Fermor’s knowledge of history, literature and languages seems more than one human brain could possibly hold. He uses countless words I have never seen before. Most sentences are so miraculously complex that it’s hard to believe that they exist.

But, at heart, the books are about a man walking, from village to village, city to city, and ultimately, from continent to continent. The idea of walking any distance long enough to be visible on a map has always seemed to me romantic and adventurous, and slightly superhuman.

Small children don’t walk. They run or they writhe on the pavement. But lockdown coincided with our kids reaching a stage when we could all walk together, in a straight line, for a period of time. We were out every day. ‘What’ll it be today, kiddies? Up the Comber Greenway, or down it?’ I enjoyed every minute.

At Christmas, I turned on Britain’s Favourite Walks: Top 100 on ITV, not expecting much. I couldn’t stop watching. Beautiful places – from cities to mountaintops – and the stories of people of every age, ability and background who make these journeys, again and again. It was a repeat and not pandemic related, but very much TV for our times.

For much of the past year, walking has been the only setting in which we can be with other people, and a curative for Zoom overdose. I hurt my ankle in October and couldn’t walk more than a few minutes at a time for about six weeks. I was a little lost.

Time for a dander.