Reflections on writing: go for a jolly good walk

I’ve always liked to walk. As a child I used to walk to school or across the fields and in the hills. The town I grew up in is in a sharp valley in the Peak District and it was never possible to walk anywhere without encountering an incline of some description. My parents didn’t own a car, so if I wanted to go anywhere it was by my legs or, on rare occasions, by bus. In winter heavy snowfall made the roads impassable and it was uncommon for the school to close so I would often tramp the mile or two to school across fields deep with crisp, untouched snow, or in summer thick with meadow grasses and bobbing yellow buttercups.

At some point this became a pleasure, I began to walk for the love of it. Often as a teenager I would climb to the top of the hill behind my house, winding my way through housing estates until the pressure of housing thinned and the path broke out into open moorland, tangled with woody heathers and bilberry bushes with their tiny purple fruits. Then there would be no sounds of cars or people chattering, no lawnmowers, just the drifting notes of birdsong and the bleating of sheep and the wind in my ears and, sometimes, the cry of a bird of prey scouring the bleak hills somewhere. When I crested the rise of the hill the fields opened out onto a broad valley with the thin streak of a road splitting it like a grey gash down the centre, too far away to carry any sound, and the great empty hills grazing the sky in the distance. I would lie down on the rough, thin grass avoiding the clustered pellets of sheep turd and watch the clouds pass. It was the most peaceful aspect of my childhood, the moment when I felt most complete and most myself, untouched by the tainting influence of other people. I’d grown up in a large family, one which had become distended with extras: the in-laws and the nieces and nephews and cousins, and it was often hard to find a moment in which I, the youngest child, could start to untangle who I really was from the narrative of what everyone expected me to be. 

I have maintained that relationship with walking, though I have moved away from the valley (how I miss it at times) and life and responsibilities mean that it is harder for me to go walking freely as I used to. I also have problems with my feet, which it turns out were not really designed for walking, so my ability to walk distance is not what it used to be when I was a tiny stripling of a kid, light as a leaf. Lack of familiarity with my new surroundings has also been a barrier: no longer do I have a stomping ground of familiar trails and with limited time it is hard to discover new ones. I am not a fan of walking in urban or suburban environments, though I don’t mind talking a stroll around the village now and again. My childhood spoiled me, I think. I am not satisfied without greenery, without wildness. I well understand the power of the moors on the work of the Brontës, how it became a kind of character in its own right much as Tove Jansson’s island does. I want a confusion of birdsong and the gurgle of a swift-running stream; I want great lakes shielding secrets in their placid waters, hills like a rumpled quilt left behind by passionate lovers. The city doesn’t do that for me, not quite.

That being said, there is value in walking. It is not just physically beneficial, but also supportive of the writerly lifestyle. I don’t mean as an affectation, but rather as a tool. Exercise of any description releases endorphins, a chemical change which has a significant impact on the mindset. Yet unlike cycling or swimming, running, football or hockey, walking absorbs the body but not the mind. When you walk, the mind is free to wander. This is a great opportunity for budding (or experienced) writers to explore ideas or seek inspiration, to puzzle out a difficult scene. At a recent short break in Wales I had only to walk for 10 to 15 minutes on the banks of a lake to generate two good ideas for stories and to puzzle out an understanding of imagery which had eluded me.

Unlike most other physical activities, walking doesn’t require a high level of physical fitness. You don’t have to walk fast, you can amble or stroll. You don’t have to walk far or with any particular purpose in mind. Just move your feet, one then another then another, and let the mind roam free. Or observe intently, letting the environment inspire and prompt you.   

It is, perhaps, not surprising then that there is a connection between writers and walking. There are innumerable examples of writers who are/were regular walkers. Virginia Woolf, for example, was a frequent walker exploring the banks and the countryside surrounding the River Ouse close to her home at Rodmell. William Wordsworth’s famous poem ‘Daffodils’ came out of a walk. Then there are writers who write about walking: Henry David Thoreau, Bill Bryson, W.G. Sebald, Sheryl Strayed, Olivia Laing, Simon Armitage to name but a sampling. The connection between the activities is strong.

It is not just writing that walking aids, but any problem that requires thinking. If you have a knotty personal problem to iron out, take a hike up into the hills feeling your lungs fill with air and strain against the effort, walk until your body is tired and your mind subdued and then, perhaps, a path to resolution will become evident. Much is said about mindfulness in these enlightened days, and a mindful walk can be a great way of breathing presence into the present moment: that flower growing from the crack in the pavement, the way the discarded lumps of chewing gum form a crazy multicoloured pattern, the splash of streetlights on a wet pavement, all these things can remind us how we are here and how life, in all its complexity and chaos, is still beautiful. Walking in the rain can be soothing or exhilarating. Walking in a storm can be terrifying. Walking, whatever the weather wherever you are, makes you feel something which is invariably better than feeling nothing.

It’s a great, big, beautiful world out there. Take a walk in it. Who knows what you’ll see. 

On Hanging Around in Book Shops

I work in a city, and I’ve worked in that same city for 20 years. It’s a small city which has changed little despite the time that has elapsed and the impact of the bombing seventeen years ago which shattered glass and buildings but left the essence of the city intact. In that time I have come to know the city well and consequently there is little left to surprise me. This is proving a problem for me. As part of my desire to adopt a more ‘writerly’ life, one of my goals is to walk more frequently. There is much to be said for leaving the office for a little while during the day, even twenty minutes away from the desk can be restorative. Walking comes highly recommended as a writerly kind of activity, as the body is occupied and the blood is pumping but the mind is free to wander. So I made myself a deal, and that deal was that I would go for a long walk at least three times a week. This is easy at home where open green fields, country paths and shadowed tree-lined walks are within easy reach, but the city, sadly, I find quite boring. There are shops and there are streets. The architecture is very familiar to me. There is a sad absence of green space and what green space remains is shrinking. I have walked this way and that and, though I try, I find it very difficult to see the beauty in so much steel and concrete. I can walk, of course, simply for the sake of walking. I can set myself a time limit and tromp around and pay little attention to where I am and the quality of my surroundings. There is something quite soulless in this kind of walking, the kind that is just about the exercise. For my walks to work, for me to gain true benefit from them, they have to offer something more than just the distance from A to B.

In the past I used to spend a lot of my lunch breaks in the library. There were lots of books and lots of nooks and crannies I could hide in and read a chapter here or a poem there. Then the library closed and three and a bit long years later it re-opened. I waited until the second day to visit, and since that day I have been trying to get my head around what exactly is wrong with it. There is a deplorable absence of books, but that alone isn’t it. Ostensibly it is the same building, but it is like they have taken the shell of it and scooped out all the warmth and humanity and left a lifeless husk behind. I imagine it like being confronted with a loved one suffering from amnesia or dementia: you look into those familiar eyes only to see a stranger staring back. Perhaps that sounds a little dramatic, but it is a fair representation of how this new version of the building makes me feel.

So walks to the library are to be done sparingly, which leaves me with a glaring lack of motivation to get away from my desk. The promise of books, their fine-leaved loveliness, is enough to get my feet moving. This is why I hang around in bookshops. I am lucky to work in a town which has a huge book shop, three floors with shelves and shelves of books and lots of chairs and sofas where you can haul up and read the first few pages of something. I have discovered that I can take a long walk, the leisurely way around, and end up at the bookshop somewhere towards the end of my walk. It is a nice place to take a rest, to have a browse and indulge in one of my other favoured activities: future book collecting. I love making lists of books I’d like to read.

I recently discovered an interest in nature writing, and books about travel and journeys. This discovery surprised me; I have always been a staunch fiction reader but my encounter with Sara Maitland’s Book of Silence changed everything. These days I hang around, often, in the nature or travel section, both of which are upstairs which adds neatly to my exercise quota. Consequently my ‘to read’ list is growing, with lists of titles like ‘Otter Country’, and ‘Gossip from the Forest’ and ‘Eight Feet in the Andes’ slipping their way into my wish list. I find these books surprisingly meditative, peaceful. the literary equivalent of lying in the warm sun by the banks of a meandering stream, listening to the bees buzzing, caressed by the long grass with the smell of wild honeysuckle in the air. You know what I mean. I remain focused on reading books by women writers, though sometimes I find my mind playing tricks on me. I see a book by ‘Sarah Gartfield’ only to take it from the shelf and find it is, in fact, Simon, but despite these little deceptions I have found a wealth of new books to read. Names like Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy, Olivia Laing and Jean Sprackland will soon be as familiar to me as Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Helen DeWitt and Tove Jansson. Old friends, side by side on the shelf. Last weekend I was lucky enough to find a copy of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen for £1 in a secondhand bookshop, and despite the fact that I’m not buying books it found its way into a little slot in my library.

I can’t afford to buy any more books. I can’t afford it in many ways. It is not just the money, though that is a consideration of course. I don’t have the space. Neither do I have the time to read them all. I have managed to accumulate a lifetime’s worth of reading material already. Sometimes I wish on myself some kind of debilitating illness which keeps me in bed all day for a year so that all I would have to do is lie there and read. Of course I know that is silly. I would be bored within a week. But there is something infinitely pleasurable in the idea of having nothing else to do in the world but read and read and read.

So I will continue with my walking, I’ll carry on hanging around in bookshops. I will continue to graze the shelves and make my lists and finger books and read first pages and not, not buy anything. Well, mostly.