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WRITERS SEEM to need to walk. Particularly natural history writers. Darwin had a 'thinking walk' by the copse behind Down House. He sometimes stopped to think for such a length of time that the squirrels accepted him as part of the scene and climbed on him.Dorothy and William Wordsworth thought nothing of walking sixteen miles to post a letter. Walking is a way of sorting out your thoughts, especially in a familiar landscape where everything is, through memory and association, a part of your own mind-set.
Miriam Rothschild, the zoologist, reckoned that we need to experience the colour green for an hour or two each day. She thought it was essential to our well being. ' . . . just walking under trees, among greenery gives you something that you cannot get anywhere else.' In Coming up for Air George Orwell has George Bowling, his rumpled anti-hero, take a few moments break from his dreary life to pause and lean on a gate. He tries to explain what it means to him;
Thinking about the mysterious lives of the small creatures in the overgrown pond by the hedge he concludes; 'You could spend a lifetime watching them, ten lifetimes, and still you wouldn't have got to the end even of that one pool. And all the while the sort of feeling of wonder, the peculiar flame inside you. It's the one thing worth having, and we don't want it.'
My walk takes me along some of the same paths that I took when, as a schoolboy, I used to run off on the cross country circuit rather than run up and down a mown field, with my inept grasp of the rules of football. I remember that feeling of leaving the everyday world of the school and running down to the wilderness of the valley.
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Who am I kidding? It's really just an excuse to get out and enjoy the day. I need a break from typing away at my latest project, so I pop out to post a letter (only one mile to the post office for me) but it is such a pleasant that afternoon I decide to walk along the canal towpath a little way and end up making a longer circuit.
'I was looking at the field, and the field was looking at me.'
I don't know whether it's one of the biggest disadvantages or one of the greatest advantages of being freelance, that I can wonder off for an hour if the mood takes me. Guilty feelings soon bring me back to my desk, but that feeling of taking time out from the daily grind is part of the pleasure of the walk. I try a couple of Blackberries from the hedge by the lane and discover that the fruits that have ripened on the top of the hedge aren't as sweet as those on the south-facing lane-side of the bush.
By the towpath, the poisonous berries of Bittersweet have ripened. On this warm autumn afternoon insects are in the air, including a white butterfly and one small beetle, that has a narrow escape when it flies into my mouth.