Natty dreads
The extraordinary story of how the simplest of acts brought a reclusive soul back into the world – and back to himself.
IT’S A CRISP, bright morning in January. Rutland Water is calm. Jimmy takes a big lungful of air. “Sometimes just the smell of outdoors is enough,” he says.
“My regular walk is five miles, but it doesn’t have to be that. It can be one mile. Half an hour. Or just standing still and smelling the air in a farmyard or a forest. It’s all better than the alternative.”
The alternative, in Jimmy’s case, is being inside with the doors locked and the blinds down. And given the extraordinary series of traumas he has gone through, that might be a perfectly understandable response.
In 2000, at the age of 17, Jimmy was walking across a park when he was attacked by a gang of four men. He was badly beaten and woke the following day in a hospital bed with his parents at his side. But while the physical injuries healed in time, the effects on his mental health have never gone away.
“It left me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” Jimmy explains.
“Nightmares at night, flashbacks in the daytime. Long bouts of depression and a permanent backdrop of anxiety. I was afraid of groups of people; afraid of being alone; afraid of the dark.”
For 12 years, Jimmy tried to manage his symptoms by himself, while building a life as best he could. But in 2012 he was made redundant and his marriage broke down.
“At that point I had nothing. And that was the point I went for a walk.” The walk was the Camino de
Santiago: the aeons-old pilgrimage trail leading from southern France, across the Pyrenees and through northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, the holy city of St James.
“I’m not a religious person. Spiritual, possibly. In need of something, definitely. And that might be all the reason you need to walk the Camino.
“There’s a fantastic film about it, called The Way. When I saw that, I just thought, ‘That’s what I need’.”
The Camino is a huge undertaking for any walker, but for someone with Jimmy’s difficulties, it was especially fraught. He suffered a panic attack in the airport departure lounge, and almost gave up three times in the first week of his 800km walk.
“The hardest part, to start with, was the communal living that goes with the pilgrimage,” he recalls.
“Eating together, sleeping in crowded dormitories. My anxiety made that very hard to manage. But the further I got, and the more people I spoke to, the more those problems receded. I was amazed. In the end I felt elated. I actually felt proud of myself.
“When I first caught sight of the cathedral at the end of the trail, I burst into tears. I felt this was it: my life was
going to start properly now. I wanted to walk everywhere and see everything.”
But it wasn’t to be. A year later, Jimmy was diagnosed with cancer. The resulting surgery saved his life but also left him with nerve damage, unable to walk any serious distance. His depression returned with force and Jimmy shut himself away, barely able to communicate even with close family.
“I didn’t walk for a very, very long time. I just sat at home on social media, which was about my only link to the outside world, aside from a very occasional short walk.”
Then one day, browsing Twitter, he discovered our very own #walk1000miles challenge. It gave him a reason to go out, and persuaded him that he could achieve a big goal with small steps. A Camino on his doorstep.
Throughout 2018, Jimmy became one of the most active members of the #walk1000miles Facebook group. His good-natured, friendly posts offered warm words and inspiration to thousands of other group members – and to the team at Country Walking.
On the Facebook page and on Twitter (as @JimmyTheDude1) he talked candidly about his mental health issues and the ways in which walking was helping him come to terms with them, which led to him making contact with thousands of other walkers with similar issues to his own.
“The point wasn’t to tell people ‘Walking will cure all your problems’ because I can’t possibly know what everyone is up against,” he says.
“It was just to say: ‘being out in the fresh air can have a positive effect. Give it a try and see what happens’.”
And with support from his partner Belle (“Without her, I dread to think where I would be now”), Jimmy smashed through the 1000-mile barrier in October 2018. Given his reluctance to travel too far from home, almost all his miles were covered in his local area. But as any thousand-miler will tell you, a mile is a mile, wherever it may be. This year, he’s aiming to do it again. “I can’t say I’m cured because I don’t think that happens,” he says bluntly.
“In fact as we speak now, I’m in the middle of a pretty difficult episode and I will need to work very hard to move out of it. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to say, ‘Right, I’m free of it all now, everything is fine.’ I can only keep getting out and remembering the positive impact that walking has.”
And he is gradually building a list of places he’d like to go walking when he feels ready to go further afield.
“There is a huge amount of Britain that I’ve never seen. I know my local area, and I know the Camino. But every month I’ve got Country Walking showing me all these incredible places people go to. I mean, Snowdon: wow.
“To some people, going to Snowdonia might seem very achievable. But for me, it isn’t. So the day when I can just get out and go to places like that; that’s what I’m building toward.
“Meantime – farms, forests, fresh air. That’s what I’m holding on to.”
‘I can only keep getting out and remembering the positive impact that walking has.’