Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the point of walking is to get from one place to another without rolling or need of a tarmac-based luge. I learned to do it 39 years ago and so far, can do it quite well. I taught my children to do it when they were a little over a year old and they’re pretty shit hot at it too, except the bits where they trip and fall on their heads. So, given that we’ve pretty much got walking sorted, why does my Mother-in-law insist we do walking whenever we see her?
“Let’s go for a walk. They’re such city children. They never walk,” she says.
But of course, here’s the lack of logic in her statement. They do walk. They don’t roll around on a giant ball like a Dyson hoover made of meat and hair. And yes, they are city children but living in a city doesn’t preclude ambulatory activity using real feet and knee joints. We’re not all so chi chi and sophis in Manchester that even nine year olds can boast their own pimped up mobility scooters.
.
Then she says, “We’re on the edge of the countryside here.”
And this is what really made me choke, before I’d even snagged my Pringle jumper on a bramble in the “woods”. My in-laws live in Croydon. My Mother-in-law must be wearing cow shit spectacles if she thinks she’s been living on the edge of the countryside in Croydon for over twenty years. Streatham has some grass but it doesn’t make it the Cotswolds. There’s a Lido in Tooting but those things floating in the water are balls of snot, chunks of polystyrene and hair, not the Maldives. Perhaps all these years she has been mistaking the teenagers in the Whitgift Centre for comely Friesian cows. Maybe she thinks the tram is some Trans-Alpine Express through the bucolic Swiss slopes instead of a piss-flavoured public-carrying slow death bullet, taking in the smells and sounds of New Addington, like a scene out of Deliverance with tattooed white men driving souped-up H-Reg Fiats instead of banjos, coz dey iz well fly, innit, bruv?
So we went for a walk.
Now, I hate to break it to you, city dwellers, but they have mud instead of tarmac in the twenty square metres of Croydon countryside. You can’t wear platforms or stilettos or white trainers or brand new school shoes. And this sadism runs in the family...
My Sister-in-law lives in proper rural Kent and I can report that she is also a keen lover of walkies and they have real mud there. And cow shit. Lots of cow and horse and chicken and sheep shit and rabbits that are not stylish jackets but which sit around with myxomatosis, giving you the evil eye. There’s not a single human turd in sight. And she likes. Walking. In. The. Shit. Not because she’s getting from her house to, say, the shop or the pub, which would be a sensible use of legs. But because it’s “bracing” and “fun”. Warning: These are euphemisms for “fucking freezing” and “pointless”.
My Sister-in-law once made me do walking during the Summer because she lives in an “area of outstanding natural beauty”. Yes, well, there are fields and I can see them from her garden and from the car. I was wearing white linen trousers and brand new canvas Pumas, for God’s sake! We got stung by nettles, the linen ended up hemmed in horseshit and my husband fell down a pothole and broke his anus. This is torture, not hospitality. We didn’t even take a flask of gin for emergencies. All wrong.
Having begun this horror story, I’m going to stop here before some of you die of flange-failure. My point is that walking as a pastime is wrong. Just utterly fucking pointless. You get mud all over perfectly good shoes and snag your favourite clothes. There’s nowhere to go for a wee. Face it, there’s nowhere to go. Running is different. That’s exhilarating and good exercise. But walking...just save it for the bloody shops, all right? I iz a city kid, ja’getme?
