Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  Yes, yes, I know. That sounds bonkers, but the idea is that, because all five senses are involved in making sure you don’t walk straight into a tree, your brain activity is increased, you concentrate harder, you become more aware and, in some cases, happier. Some Chinese also believe that walking backwards means they can correct sins or mistakes they have made. The obvious drawback is that, if one is even vaguely unbalanced, one will fall over and break many bones, rendering the improvement to one’s brain and/or muscles a little unnecessary. But I don’t want to rain on their retro-walking parade.

  I have some sympathy for them searching for a way in which to improve their mental state, because being in a Chinese city for any length of time can be a depressing experience. Not because of the people or the food, or even the attitude of some hotels that having cockroaches sharing your bathroom is perfectly acceptable. These things are all manageable, but what I can’t live with is the fact that there is no sky. Seriously, there is no sky over Chengdu, the fastest-expanding city in the world. Instead, there is a depth of cloud that takes five or ten minutes for the plane to fly through. You don’t see sunrise or sunset; it just gets light and then gets dark. There is no blue, no white clouds shaped like bunny rabbits, no pink haze. And no views.

  Fourteen million people live and work in a haze of fug, that combination of smog, fog and mugginess. It minimizes the world and makes it feel as if it is shrinking in around you. We went up into the hills to film the pandas at the Wolong National Natural Reserve, and I could barely see beyond the tops of the trees. I knew we were up in the mountains with valleys down below because we’d climbed up and up in the car, but there was no view at all, no sense of distance or perspective. It was claustrophobic and depressing.

  I was allowed to cuddle baby pandas and feed the toddlers, which was one of the highlights of my life, but I will never forget that fug. No wonder the locals get up early to walk backwards up a hill.

  The best thing about walking is that you can find a space where all around you is sky. You have to climb to get there, but that’s part of the deal.

  ‘Are you all ready? Right, let’s go.’ The Grand Walking Officer was directing the troops out of the car park from the village of Exford in Somerset. He had a stick in his hand, a map around his neck and a rucksack on his back.

  Lucy had picked me up at Tiverton Parkway (again) and I had driven (of course) through the narrow lanes of Bampton and Dulverton towards Exmoor National Park. Two thirds of the park lies in Somerset, one third in Devon, but although we were on the Somerset side, we were meeting a group that came from North Devon.

  In this group, mostly made up of people who had now retired, there were fourteen of them with two dogs. I would hazard the average age (not including the dogs) was sixty-five. They meet every Tuesday to walk, their only rule being that the walk must end at a pub.

  The weather was warm enough for some to wear shorts, although as Janet, a retired teacher, told me, ‘We always wear shorts in Somerset. You have to.’

  We set out along the River Exe, which glittered between the leaves of the trees to our right. The river burbled, and so did the group as we forked up on to the moor. There was a marked lack of arable farming in the area, with the vast majority of fields given over to grass so that sheep and cows can rule the domain. As we climbed higher, the vegetation became sparser, but a strong, thick beech hedge defied the wind, its leaves rustling loudly in the breeze, yet its branches remained unbending.

  We stopped to admire the view across the fields to Exmouth, the church steeple standing proud in the middle of the village. Looking east to Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor, you could fully appreciate the gentle nature of this moorland. It didn’t feel hostile or barren but gave that precious sense of space and freedom.

  We had sky all around, the air was clean and pure, the sun was out and someone else was doing the map reading. All was well in my world.

  Although there are many advantages of walking with a group – the variety of voices and experiences, collective humour and natural bonhomie – one of the drawbacks is that I can’t talk to everyone. We have to be selective, and Lucy has perfected the art of shepherding, with me as her barking sheepdog. She whistles, and I peel one or two individuals from the group to walk with us at the back, away from the hubbub.

  Soon I was picking up tips on how to plan for retirement. Everyone concurred that you had to have a diary full of events to look forward to.

  One of the women recalled the day her husband stopped work. ‘He said, “What are we going to do today?” So I said, “Well, I’m going to carry on doing all the things I’ve been doing for the last thirty years of our marriage and you can join in or not. It’s up to you.”

  ‘I think it was the first time he realized that the house hadn’t run itself all those years. We had to find a new rhythm and find things we both wanted to do. It was a bit stressful to begin with, but now I really enjoy it and we’re learning not to irritate each other.’

  We were in single file, shuffling down shale steps that looked as if they’d been through a bread slicer set to ‘super thin’. If you looked at a vertical cross section of the steps, they were made up of layer upon layer of thin, dark-grey rock.

  Mary, who had two poles, was fairly skipping down them, in the manner of a mountain goat. My progress was more like one of Hannibal’s elephants. My step has never been light. The Grand Walking Officer was leading the way as we followed obediently behind, making our way through a tunnel of trees like a snake of schoolchildren.

  I heard the rustling of beech leaves as we came back towards the banks of the River Exe. They make a particular kind of music as they gossip with each other in the wind. The trees were coated with a thick layer of lichen, a testament to the purity of the air.

  Members of the group were laughing with each other and teasing Patrick, who is ex-army, challenging him to balance on a slippery log to cross the river. Patrick was tall and wiry, with muscular legs. He was wearing a navy-blue polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts, his belt carrying what looked like a walkie-talkie and a penknife. He was like a grown-up Boy Scout, and he would be able, I am sure, to negotiate the log if he wanted to. It had no ropes or anything on it to save a brave or daft person from falling into the water from it.

  The two dogs that came with us, a Labrador and a collie cross, were chasing sticks into the water. Patrick gave the impression that he was perfectly capable and brave enough to cross the log, but his wife, Sarah, interjected with a brilliant piece of logic.

  ‘It’s very overgrown at the end,’ she loudly declared. ‘And he’s got no dry clothing,’ she added quietly.

  ‘That’s what one does,’ she confided in me later. ‘Saves one’s other half!’

  There was a perfectly safe bridge, which the rest of us crossed, followed by a reluctant Patrick. The group was discussing Pilates, bridge, holidays, future walks, and the other things they do to keep their bodies and minds active. They were full of energy, willing to explore something new, appreciative of the landscape around them.

  Getting to know this group makes me realize that I’ve been afraid of stopping and looking behind me. My life is so varied, so full of adrenalin highs, changing subjects and remarkable people that I worry I will turn into apple crumble the day I call it quits. After meeting this group, I feel differently: I’m full of hope and excitement.

  Of course, this may wear off – Lucy will tell you that I am a very impressionable individual. I’ll come back from walks wanting to convert to Buddhism or deciding that I’m going to be a poet, an artist or a taxidermist.

  We paused to look backwards at the steep slope of a lime-green hill leading down to a wall of trees.

  ‘Sometimes you have to turn around,’ said the Grand Walking Officer. ‘If you keep just looking forward, you miss the best views.’

  5

  My mother is under the impression that living in a city is inherently less healthy than living in the countryside. But the statistics te
ll another story: people in cities tend to walk more each day than their rural counterparts, who often drive to work, to see friends and to the shops.

  I enjoy walking in cities. It’s the only way to really appreciate them. London’s boroughs whizz by in the car or from a bus, whereas on foot you discover that the character of each area is distinct. You take in the street names and wonder at the past happenings in Bleeding Heart Yard, Knightrider Street or Petty France. There is a personality to our street names that New York, for all its efficiency, will never achieve with its grid system.

  Who wants to meet at First and 14th when you can come out of the Tube at Mansion House, turn right on to Cannon Street, left up Walbrook, left at the top along Poultry (before it becomes Cheapside) and rendezvous in Old Jewry, not far from Ironmonger Lane? There are people and stories and centuries in those names. Although you’ll get hopelessly lost, you know you do so in the footsteps of millions before you.

  I recently walked from a meeting near St Paul’s to another near Buckingham Palace. By underground or car, they’d always seemed opposite ends of the city. In fact, the route is less than three miles, and it takes in the river, Trafalgar Square and St James’s Park. It took less than an hour and I didn’t even get lost.

  Charles Dickens walked between ten and fifteen miles every day, and when he was in London the city would have been choked with fog and pungent with the stench of human sewage and horse droppings. For all that modern London is busy with cars and people, it may actually be more pleasant to walk around in 2014 than it was in 1840.

  The paths along the Thames and the vast expanses of parkland make London a walkers’ paradise. It’s easy to get to Hampstead Heath, or Epping Forest, or Richmond Park and, as a country girl, I am always amazed to discover so many open spaces in the capital. As my ramblings have taken me around the UK, I’ve discovered that London is not alone: Manchester has Heaton Park, Liverpool has Newsham, Stanley and Sefton parks, Birmingham has Aston Park, Leeds has Roundhay Park (at more than 700 acres, one of the largest city parks in Europe), part of Sheffield lies within the Peak District National Park, and Glasgow has some ninety parks and public gardens, including the magnificent Necropolis.

  It’s all there if you’re willing to look for it. The mistake I made when I first came to London was that I didn’t know I would have to do the legwork myself. I thought the city would come to me. I assumed I’d be busy every night, either working on shift at BBC Radio Sport, or out on the town. My diary would be effortlessly packed and life would be a non-stop whirl of different faces and conversations. In reality, London can be the loneliest place in the world. Yes, there are lots of different faces, but if you don’t know any of them all they do is swirl around you, sending you dizzy with confusion.

  Everyone seemed to be on the way to something or someone, and I was going nowhere. I remember sitting in my top-floor flat in Parsons Green, staring at the phone and willing it to ring, hoping for an invitation to something. I didn’t realize that London doesn’t happen for you without a bit of effort. I learned to suggest outings or to invite myself to things, just to avoid endless nights watching TV and eating pasta with pesto sauce.

  Back then, I wasn’t into walking, otherwise I’m sure life would have been different. I could have joined a walking book-club, or I could have been part of the many walking networks that suggest routes every weekend in or out of London.

  It wouldn’t take much to get the whole of London walking further and doing so more regularly. These days I speak to a lot of big businesses: along with suggesting that they might like to sponsor women’s sport, I always ask if they have a walking group. I tend to get a few baffled looks, but I’m deadly serious.

  Imagine how many boardroom meetings would be better taken as a circular four-mile walk. More fun, more energy, more creativity and no risk of people falling asleep or mucking about on Facebook while someone else is speaking. Everyone would share the same experience but in a different way, they would talk to different people, and by the time they got back to the office they’d be flushed with excitement and ideas.

  Few cities can top London for a combination of architecture, culture, thriving community and walking options. One that can is Edinburgh.

  Most people enjoy walking because they enjoy the feeling of escape. Well, there is simply nothing like walking out of a humming Waverley Station, rejecting Princes Street and heading for Holyrood Park instead. An hour or so later, having clambered up the path that runs parallel to the basalt cliffs called Salisbury Crags, you can be standing on top of a volcano, looking down at the castle and the city from Arthur’s Seat. Now that is a true escape. You may have been overtaken by barefoot fell runners en route and you will probably not be alone at the top, but it’s a thrilling feeling to stare down at the teeming streets below while the wind whistles around your ears and the sky stretches out before you.

  I climbed up to Arthur’s Seat on a late summer’s day and looked across the city to the Firth of Forth, the red Forth railway bridge glinting in the sunlight, the road bridge alongside it dancing with cars. I could see up the Fife coast and imagined golfers thwacking balls on links courses all the way along it. Turning around to the south-west, the view was dominated by the grass- and heather-clad Pentland Hills – the ‘hills of home’, according to Robert Louis Stevenson. I walked there once and got hopelessly lost, but that’s nothing new.

  I used to spend New Year’s Eve in Edinburgh, with my university friends. One of them – a tall, handsome historian with floppy black hair called Rob Fell – annually abused his mother’s good nature by inviting us all to stay in her Georgian terraced flat. It was on one of those gorgeous crescents in Edinburgh and was impeccably kept. That was until about 4 p.m. on 31 December, when it would be covered in clothes, half-eaten packets of biscuits, sleeping bags and empty wine bottles.

  By the third year of our Hogmanay adventures, Mrs Fell had decided to move out of the flat for the week. Luckily, I had broken my ribs falling off a horse in a daft drag-hunt race – he had stopped at a double of hedges and I had been shoulder first into the ground. Then he’d trodden on me, just for good measure. You may think that is unlucky, but when there’s only one decent bed on offer, having broken ribs is the trump card.

  ‘Clare should have my bed,’ announced Mrs Fell as she departed with her overnight case. ‘She’s broken her ribs, for God’s sake. She can’t sleep on the floor.’

  I dumped my bag on her enormous double bed and said, calmly, ‘I suppose I’d better do what your mother says, Rob.’

  I managed to delay my manic grin until I’d shut the door and disappeared into the en-suite bathroom. There I flushed the loo to disguise the noise of me shouting, ‘Result!’

  Our Hogmanay festivities consisted of many things I don’t clearly remember, but I do know they involved a lot of alcohol and that at about 11 p.m. we would head out into Princes Street to try to get a decent position for the fireworks. It was always very cold. I mean really, bitterly cold, which made it tricky to look vaguely trendy (although I had no idea what this meant – as far as I was concerned, you couldn’t go wrong with a pair of green jeans and a polka-dot polo-neck body). My solution was to wear the polo-neck body, tie a jumper around my waist and take my super-thick puffa jacket. I may have looked like a walking Michelin man, but at least I wasn’t going to get frostbite.

  One year, I had had a few drinks and was feeling full of love for the world so I decided I’d start kissing boys. There was no selection policy involved: anyone would do. I skipped up to a policeman and asked him if I could kiss him.

  ‘That’s nae strictly allow—’ he started to say as I stood on tiptoes and planted my lips on his ‘—ed’.

  ‘Happy New Year!’ I said as I ran away.

  I remember standing between Rob and my best friend, Mike, as we watched the fireworks cascading out of Edinburgh Castle. Mike and I had been friends since the day I arrived at Cambridge. He was ridiculously tall, but gentle and polite. I had an army off
icer boyfriend during my first two years at university, so with Mike there was never any of that sexual awkwardness that so often hampers a male–female friendship. Mind you, that Hogmanay I was pretty determined that I was going to kiss him.

  ‘Come on,’ I begged him. ‘I’ve got nine so far and you’d round it off to a perfect ten.’

  I tugged at his jacket, trying to bring his face down to my level. Mike had been drinking, too, but he never lost his innate sense of decency. He looked down at me, pity in his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, Clare,’ he intoned, ‘but I will not be a number.’

  I was crestfallen that night, but now I thank Mike for caring enough about our friendship not to ruin it with a drunken snog. Apart from Louise, who was my closest friend from Newnham College, my university friends were nearly all male, and they are all still friends today. They know my schoolfriends well, because they’ve all been coming to the same parties for the last twenty years. I do love a party, and I always try to celebrate my birthday, because it’s at the end of January, and I figure that everyone needs a get-together at the end of January.

  I turned forty in January 2011 and was determined to welcome the landmark in style.

  My father knew it was my birthday because I’d been banging on about it for months and because I’d asked him to my party. Dad loves a party, too. He doesn’t like organizing them, and he moans like hell about going to them but, once he’s there, he always enjoys himself. His favourite parties are his own (‘because those are the only ones where I like nearly everyone in the room’), or mine, because he adores my schoolfriends. It’s amazing how well he remembers all their names when he can barely recall mine.

  In fact, he once said to me, in all seriousness, ‘You came to our wedding, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, Dad, I didn’t. But I’m sure it was lovely.’