Are you sitting comfortably? Enjoying your Christmas holidays in the warmth of your home while you can hear the winter rains coming down and the cold winds blow? Good.
Because today’s post is not meant to chase you out of the house in search of some outdoor experience but to make you lean back and let your mind do the wandering. Christmas time, after all, is also reading time.
Here are a few Christmas reading, recommendations of articles on the topics of hiking or travelling that caught our attention over the past twelve months.
First of all, something new. Over the years, we have taken you up some mountains (okay: perhaps not the loftiest of peaks but still), along craggy coastlines and through thick forests. But we have never invited you on any trail remotely like the Broomway.
This trail is something else: for one, some of the place names along its route – the Wakering Stairs, Foulness – sound more like metaphors than like real towns, as though they had leapt out of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
But above all, because the Broomway is widely known as the grisliest, most dangerous path in England. Intrigued? Then you may read on.
The remaining articles on today’s reading list all play in a more reflexive register, concentrating on the theory rather than the actual practice of hiking.
Have you ever asked yourself, for example, why humans are the only primates which have evolved the capacity for moving forward on two legs instead of four?
Then this piece – written by the well-known hiking enthusiast and humourist Bill Bryson – has been made especially for you.
The next article may come a little late for this Christmas, but remember that books are a great gift at any time of the year. And what better to buy someone who is a dedicated hiker than something about his favourite pastime?
Books on walking are a little like the proverbial city buses that come in batches after you have waited in vain for long periods of time. 2019 was a good year for new releases on the topic, and this piece reviews two of the outstanding publications.
Erling Kagge in particular made some pretty large headlines this year. The next piece – full of interesting quotes from and interesting anecdotes delivered by the fascinating Norwegian explorer-cum-philosopher – provides more evidence for the close affinity between the acts of walking and creative thinking, taking you from Socrates via Darwin and Charles Dickens all the way to Lin-Manuel Miranda and his musical “Hamilton”.
You don’t need to be a creative artist, however, to benefit from walking. A walk through any city – even your own which you may think you already know fairly well – can serve to enlarge and enrich your mind and your life. All you need to do is follow a few rules. Here is a starter of how to do it.
And, last but not least and just to confirm what we have always known, walking is good for you on a physical level, too. Walking makes you healthier, happier and brainier, says neuroscientist Shane O’Mara.
And once you have followed his argument, you may want to follow his footsteps, too, “exchanging your gym kit for a pair of comfy shoes and get strolling”.
But beware: in walking, as in all things on earth, balance is all and moderation the key to a happy outcome. What happens when walking turns from a delightful hobby into a compulsion is related in this historical account of a truly remarkable life.
Meet George Wilson, the man who could not stop walking.
Finally, something to look at rather than read. Los Angeles enjoys a mixed reputation (“72 suburbs in search of a city”, Dorothy Parker memorably quipped), but there is beauty there if you know how to find it.
That is all from us this year. We will be back in 2020 with more “adventures for beginners” and, until then…..
