Then there was the time she came to the launch party for my first book, My Animals and Other Family. Worried about creasing her new linen dress on the train, she’d decided to put it into a carry-bag, which she promptly left at home. I remember thinking that her white trench coat was very nice, but a bit of an odd choice for a drinks party.
Anyhow, my brand-new boots got their first Ramblings outing in Somerset, with a poet. The sky looked a little grumpy, and so was the poet, who seemed surprised that we were there at all, almost as if she’d forgotten we were coming. We trudged out of her freezing house, which had no electricity, and set off through a gap in the hedge towards a river. She wasn’t exactly forthcoming, so, despite my feet feeling a little cramped, I went on a full charm offensive, determined to warm her up.
On the train to Tiverton Parkway, I’d been reading her work, much of which was about her husband. So I thought it perfectly natural to enquire after his whereabouts.
‘Why are you asking about my husband?’ she said, slightly spitting between gritted teeth.
‘Well, because you write about him so beautifully,’ I replied, with what I thought was a winning smile.
‘I’d rather you didn’t. The bastard left me last month and I don’t want to talk about it.’
Right, well, there we are.
I may have said these words out loud, in that way you do when you have absolutely no idea how you are going to fill the next three hours, which were meant to be spent in warm, radio-friendly conversation. My toes had curled in embarrassment and I couldn’t seem to straighten them again. Ow.
Just as the poet was finally defrosting, the heavens opened. Now that it had started, however, Lucy didn’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation. I pointed at my legs and at her rucksack (where I’d shoved my waterproof trousers) and at the sky, but she shook her head and did that thing where her eyes tell me what I’m meant to do next. Message received – I kept asking questions and the poet kept responding. Fifteen minutes later I was soaked to the skin and, as well as cramp, I had foot rot.
We came to a road and had to stop, so I seized my chance.
‘My trousers are soaked,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have to take them off and put the waterproofs on instead. I think my new boots are a bit tight as well. I’ll go into that bus shelter.’
Lucy followed me with the rucksack, and kept recording. I let out a sigh of relief as I unlaced my boots, my feet finally released, like a horse being turned out into the paddock. Ooh, that felt good! I covered the red bits in blister plasters (about five of them on each foot). Lucy was surprisingly unsympathetic. I commentated on the stripping-off of wet trousers and the pulling-on of dry waterproofs, more as a joke for us than for broadcast. I didn’t realize Lucy was going to put it in the programme.
This little interlude is what prompted the strangest fan letter I have ever received:
Dear Miss Balding,
I would like to congratulate you on the most erotic radio I have ever listened to.
I have not listened to Ramblings before but I will certainly be tuning in from now on, particularly if you continue in this manner. They say the pictures are better on the radio and I now know exactly what they mean. It was quite thrilling.
Many congratulations. An alternative career most definitely awaits, should you desire one.
Yours sincerely,
Major Jonathan Harrington-Harvey*
We walk whatever the weather.
Only once in fifteen years have we had to postpone an adventure. We were in the North Pennines, planning a spectacular walk from High Force Waterfall to Low Force and back again. But when we stepped out from the protective shield of the visitor centre, the wind nearly blew us off the hilltop.
I looked at the sheep huddled into the base of the stone walls that divided their field and figured that they weren’t as stupid as they looked. We could walk in the wind, but the microphone (even with its fluffy cover) could not handle the buffeting. The wind took our voices and deposited them on the ears of sheep a mile away. There was no point in recording, so we drew stumps and came back another day.
Apart from that occasion, we will walk in rain, snow and ice, through mud and through sand.
I arrive home and tell Alice that we must move to Yorkshire or Cornwall or the Orkneys. She nods and says, ‘Of course we must,’ before sending Lucy a text: ‘She wants to move again. Must have been a good walk.’
I am better now at assessing distance than when we first started. I remember trudging along Hadrian’s Wall with a student from Newcastle University who turned to me after a short descriptive monologue during which I’d incorrectly assessed how far we had travelled.
‘Do you do this for effect,’ he asked, ‘or are you just stupid?’
It’s quite tricky to carry on polite conversation with someone after they’ve said that to your face. It’s even harder to do so while walking through featureless countryside on a horrid day trying to make a programme in which you are meant to sound as if you’re enjoying the experience.
Lucy shot me a look of supportive horror and let me drop back to lick my wounds while she sweet-talked old clever clogs into a kinder mood. This was early in our walking relationship, and it was the moment I knew we would be friends for life.
Sometimes, Lucy switches off the tape machine for ten minutes, partly because it’s not practical to record when we’re all in single file and partly because it means she can talk to members of the group and warm them up, finding out information for the next ‘scene’. Lucy thinks in scenes, like in a play, and fades out of one and into the next, but the work she does ‘backstage’, talking to the walkers before we start and during the walk, is as important as the recording or the editing.
Between us, we try to start each programme slightly differently. Some will start with someone else talking – for example, the leader telling the group where we are walking – and some will start with me already on the move, or on my way to meet the walkers.
Once we started in a café, trying to decide whether it was safe to climb up the north face of Tryfan in the pouring rain. Luckily, the answer was in the negative and, although we didn’t stay where I wanted to (in the warm and dry of the café, eating cake and drinking coffee), we did go on a slightly less challenging, lateral route.
Lucy was most offended by a letter she received complaining about the loudness of the sound effects on a walk we did in Dorset. We were traipsing through a particularly deep and sticky ploughed field, discussing Thomas Hardy.
‘Sound effects? What sound effects?’ she spluttered. ‘What an outrageous slur! I’m going to write back and tell him that we’ve never used any sound effects and, if he doesn’t know what walking across a sopping-wet ploughed field sounds like, then he needs to get out more. Preferably in the rain.’
Lucy records ‘wild track’ every so often. We all have to be quiet while she looks into the middle distance and I mouth, ‘Are you sure it’s recording?’ The ambient sound, whether it be a river flowing, sheep baaing or aeroplanes overhead, is the glue that holds the programme together. Any jumps in conversation can be covered with a little bit of wild track. So no, we don’t use sound effects, but we do use the soundtrack of the day.
As she does that, I try to live those moments more fully, mainly thanks to a doctor we walked with in the hills near Hay-on-Wye who tried to teach me ‘mindfulness’.
I didn’t arrive in the best frame of mind. I’d been filming until 2 a.m. the day before in a studio in Salford and the journey to Hay had taken about three hours longer than I wanted it to. The wind was too strong to follow our original plan of walking up to Lord Hereford’s Knob, so we walked on lower ground on the border with Wales. I was grumpy with Lucy, grumpy with the weather and grumpy with life. Not myself at all.
Right at that moment, I felt I didn’t need to be out on a windy hill recording Ramblings. After about ten minutes, I realized it was the thing I needed more than anything else. If ever there was a ‘wake-up call
’, this walk was it.
It doesn’t come naturally to me to walk in silence. It doesn’t come naturally to me to do anything much in silence. But Dr Kate Kirkwood made me understand that walking was a chance to break the cycle of ‘all the talking, all the thinking and all the interacting we spend all our waking hours doing’. She made me concentrate on my footsteps, made me feel the ground beneath my feet, listen to my breathing and feel the wind on my face. This wasn’t a walk so much as a couple of hours’ free therapy.
Kate explained that you need to practise mindfulness, to escape thoughts, to just be: ‘Even in the middle of a busy day surrounded by people, you can remind yourself to be conscious of the sensation of your feet within your shoes on the ground, or the feeling of the chair against your thighs. You can dip into the body at any time and, strangely, that seems to help to anchor me and keep me calm.’
I am conscious of my body, but only when it’s hurting. I don’t appreciate it for the things it does every day without complaining. The joy of simply being able to walk is something I have recently tried not to take for granted. I now refer to my morning perambulations as my ‘freedom walks’. Not just because I feel that they are an escape from the phone and the computer, but because I am free to walk. I can do it without pain, my dodgy back and knees having improved for regular gentle exertion, and my head is clearer.
Talking of the head, Kate said something that I’d never considered before: ‘Thinking is overrated. We think so much, but if we really look at what we’re thinking, isn’t it the same old things over and over again? Where has all your thinking got you? For me, I would say not very far. What has been more useful to me has been trying to cultivate some sort of calm by sinking beneath the thinking. Cultivating “being” rather than constantly “doing” – whether that’s doing physically or mentally.’
I thought about the things I thought about and immediately got a headache. Usually, it’s a vicious little vortex of decisions I have to make about how many work commitments I can fit into a given day, stress about letters I haven’t replied to or meetings I’m being persuaded to attend … It’s not that I don’t like a meeting (I love them), but there are just so many of them, and few of them seem to achieve anything.
I tried to practise putting my mind on standby. Kate explained that I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking, but the trick was not to follow the thoughts. I could notice that thoughts had sprung up but I was not to develop them. I tried it, for at least a minute. I chanted to myself, ‘I am here, I am now.’ It made me more aware of everything around me, the feel of my feet within my boots, the sound of the mud squelching beneath them, the change in wind direction and the sudden warmth of light from the sun.
‘I am here, I am now.’
(Take two steps.)
‘I am here, I am now.’
When the minute was up, my mind was bursting with even more ideas than before. I started thinking about the mental benefits of sport, the way it gives people time to concentrate purely on the game being played or the race being run. Sport creates a sort of meditation, and it feeds into my belief that concentration is the key to happiness. I am sure the same is true of playing music, or gardening, or sewing, or indeed reading – they offer our brains the chance to zero in on the thing in front of us and not be distracted by fast, random thoughts that flash into our heads.
Maybe that’s why children are so captivated by video games and why even adults get addicted to their PlayStations. When I interviewed Usain Bolt I was surprised that the fastest man in the world is an obsessive ‘gamer’. His passion for video games is matched only by his appreciation of Manchester United, both giving him a thrill and a sense of jeopardy that can’t hurt him. I’ve also heard of footballers who stay up all night playing games and go straight to a match the next day.
I can see why their brains need that fix. I’d rather go for a walk.
Lucy gave me a framed photograph for my fortieth birthday. It shows five of us walking along a beach, wearing caps and many layers of clothing. There is enough light to cast shadows of our frames on the shimmering sand ahead of us. The sand is glistening not with sunlight but with rain. It is a grim day and, not surprisingly, there is no one else daft enough to be walking anywhere near us.
Luckily for one who lives on our fair isle, I like the rain. When I was young I used to run out into the garden with my mouth open and my face turned up to the sky, catching droplets on my tongue. I had a quote copied in my teenage diary that read ‘Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass – it’s about learning to dance in the rain,’ and I took it literally. As soon as it started to rain, I was out there dancing.
(My mother is of the school that says there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. She is a no-nonsense kind of a mum. If you’ve had a fall and you’re not unconscious, you should just get up and carry on. Mum listened to an early edition of Ramblings but didn’t like it because I was, apparently, ‘constantly out of breath’. I don’t think she’s listened since.)
Anyway, the photo Lucy gave me is of a walk we did on the east coast of Scotland, just north of Aberdeen. We were exploring a natural phenomenon known as the Sands of Forvie. It’s a national nature reserve and unique because of the sand dunes, which stretch for three and a half miles in length and one mile in width.
There is no protection from the wind on the sands, and on the day we visited we could see the dunes moving, along with our hair. The formation is revised and reworked by the wind daily. Even the trees are stunted in growth because of it. I was beginning to think I might shrink over the course of the walk, I was bending into the wind so much.
I was walking with one of Forvie’s finest, Elizabeth Hay. Elizabeth’s family had come to Aberdeenshire in the early eighteenth century and she told me she has always had a sense of belonging.
‘This is my part of Scotland,’ she explained, ‘and it’s like putting on an old pair of slippers. It’s a place that always changes but is always the same.’
The landscape looked as if an army of children had built a sandcastle village and a giant had come along and kicked it in. I wasn’t too far off the truth, because there was, explained my guides, a hidden village under the sand. That spooked me – the thought of buildings and bones beneath us.
My sense of discomfort increased when they spoke about the ‘Curse of Forvie’. The daughter of the laird had inherited a large tract of land and her uncle was not impressed. In what he thought was an entirely reasonable response, he put her ‘out to sea’: he sent her off on a boat, never to return.
As the winds filled the sails, the unlucky heiress put a curse on Forvie, shouting:
If ever maydenis malysone
Dyd licht upon dry land,
Lat nocht bee fund in Furvye’s glebys
bot thystl, bente and sande.
Meaning that if she was never allowed to return to dry land, the village would never be the same. The curse came to fruition in 1413, when a sandstorm covered the whole thing, burying the buildings. All of them. No one was killed, which makes it a fairly humane curse, in my view.
The eeriness of Forvie seeped under my skin as we stood on the dunes. There are times when landscapes move you, touch you deep within and leave you with a lasting sense of something special. You can’t appreciate it from the windows of a car, or a train. You can’t take a short cut and pull over into a lay-by to take a photo. The only way really to feel the landscape is to walk it.
That’s especially true of walking on sand, which gives you that feeling as you sink with each step. And as long as it’s packed firm, walking on sand is easier, because it’s flat terrain. Unless you are stupid and decide to scale the dunes themselves, which of course I did. The protest from my calves lasted for days.
If you walk where the sand is dry, your feet slip back with every stride, so it’s like walking on a treadmill. The hard, wet sand is the best option, which is where my Forvie companions stayed and where, finally, I rejoined them. We strolled happ
ily, five abreast, the Scottish wind whipping our faces.
Elizabeth told me how she used to play Arabs in the Desert when she was a child, and shared a rather alarming story of her son heading out to collect sea shells and driftwood and coming home proudly with an incendiary bomb, a remnant of the Second World War use of the Forvie Sands as an artillery range. She seemed unfussed: it was just one of those things you find.
It was a grey day, but Ellie Ingram, an artist who was also with us, told me that if she were painting the scene she would dip into a palette of orange and brown, yellow, coral, blue, green and white. I love walking with artists, because they see so much more.
‘It looks grey on first glimpse,’ she explained, ‘but that’s just our lazy eye interpretation. Look closer and you’ll see the colours.’
The marram grass rose above the dunes, giving them a shifting Mohican hairstyle. The sky loomed, full of angry grey clouds. The seahorses were jumping imaginary fences, landing in a bath of North Sea foam.
We stopped for what Elizabeth called a ‘chittery bite’ – when she swam in the North Sea as a child, her teeth would chatter when she came out and she’d snack on her food with a staccato nibble. She told me that if I were to swim in the bay I should pick the north side. As the rain continued to fall with steady determination, I pointed out that the very idea of swimming in the bay was about as attractive as dancing naked on the North Pole.
The coastline had turned from a sweet, benign child into a bit of a stroppy teenager, with rocks and rugged bays. I love that the coast of Britain does that. In the space of an hour your feet can take you from broad, open, flat sands to rocky inlets with steep climbs and slippery descents.
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