Stephen Fry on walking
Actor, wordsmith and national treasure Stephen Fry explains why a daily walk is his thinking space, why looking up is important, and why #walk1000miles is ‘an idea without flaw’…
A national treasure on UK’s biggest self-improvement movement.
HE WAS THE proud purveyor of A Bit of Fry and Laurie; the eternal nemesis of the Blackadder dynasty; the founding host of QI and the definitive Jeeves.
And as if we didn’t have enough reasons to love Stephen Fry, he’s also a man who takes a walk every day, unless something silly gets in his way.
He’s a man who has known stellar highs and heartbreaking lows; a campaigner for mental health awareness, and one of the funniest people ever to have used the word ‘hevelspending’ (apparently a Lappish noun meaning ‘the gasp made by one who, walking in the morning, smells spring in the air after a long winter’).
So who better to kick off Country Walking’s guide to the world of walking in 2020 than he? After all, he’s the man who once said: “You can’t lick the system. But you can give it a damn good fondling.”
CW: What does walking do for you? SF: Mainly mood improvement and a modicum of weight loss too (though on its own it won’t quite do it, you have to cut food intake too of course).
CW: And in a broader sense, why should people, in general, go walking? SF: There seem to be so many reasons. Almost every week there seems to be a new story in the press making claims for walking as the new superpower. It fights ageing! It helps sleep! It deals with depression! It lowers blood pressure! It eases back pain! It spanks the bottom of Type 2 diabetes and stamps on the toes of heart disease! I don’t doubt much of this is founded in truth, because it is certainly a healthy activity. But on top of that, it’s a way of seeing the world: you notice things when you walk, especially birds and the change of seasons. Even in the depths of the city you get to know the magpies and crows. You note the opening of the buds or the falling of the conkers. It connects you deeply to the rhythms of nature. And if you walk regularly and in the same place, you get to know some of the people who march to the same beat. You recognise their dogs and their children.
CW: Has walking ever aided your creative output? (The author Michael
Morpurgo speaks of taking his characters for a walk to ‘meet’ them, and goes out for a Devonian stroll when he hits an impasse in his writing. Does that sound familiar?)
SF: Very much so. It’s a perfect time to have a conversation with yourself, to take your thoughts for a walk too and see where they go. And it’s very important either to jot them down or speak them into a voice memo app, because you can bet the inspirations that come on a walk will be forgotten once you’re back in the world.
CW: Some wonderful writers and thinkers have espoused the humble walk: Socrates, Proust, Thoreau, Eliot, Gros, Macfarlane, Björk… to name a random few. Has anyone particularly influenced your interest in walking, or changed your view of it?
SF: Dickens, one of my literary heroes, was a confirmed walker. He, like so many Victorians, would think nothing of taking a 20-mile walk. He was inspired by London’s river, the Thames, and wrote quite brilliantly about what he saw there and how it stirred his imagination.
CW: Many of our readers and #walk1000miles friends say walking has helped them to contend with issues of anxiety and depression. As someone who has experienced and explored
‘It’s a way of seeing the world: you notice things when you walk… You get to know the magpies and crows.’
Born: Hampstead, London, 1957.
Background: Stephen says he’s descended from the family which founded the Fry’s confectionery brand in the 18th century. He grew up in the Norfolk village of Booton and, after a chequered education career, gained a place at Queen’s College, Cambridge in 1978.
University: As well as excelling academically, Stephen joined the Footlights dramatic society, working with future talents including Ben Elton, Emma Thompson and of course, his eventual comedy partner Hugh Laurie. He also appeared on University Challenge (right).
Television: Stephen and Hugh broke into TV soon after leaving Cambridge, starting with The Cellar Tapes in 1982. They also appeared in an episode of The Young Ones (in a spoof version of University Challenge). Their sketch series A Bit of Fry and Laurie ran from 1989 to 1995, and they appeared together in three series of Blackadder. In 2003 he became the founding host of panel game show QI, retaining the chair until 2016.
Writing: Stephen is a prolific writer, the scribe of novels such as The Liar, The Hippopotamus and Making History and non-fiction works like the acclaimed Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece. He has also written three autobiographical works; the most recent,
More Fool Me, was published in 2014.
Other Quite Interesting things: He has served as a director of his beloved Norwich City FC, is a voracious consumer of podcasts, says he is ‘deeply dippy for all things digital’ and claims to have bought the third Macintosh computer sold in the UK (adding that his friend, the author Douglas Adams, bought the first two).
Find out more at stephenfry.com
H AVE YOU DISCOVERED Geograph?
If not, go to geograph.org.uk right now.
If you’re interested in maps, landscapes, history, archaeology or photography, you’ll love it.
Set up in 2005 by a small group of volunteers,
Geograph is a project to map the British Isles with photographs of every single square kilometre. The site currently hosts over six million moderated, geo-located and dated images,
– and it’s still growing. The Country Walking team uses it all the time for reasearch and feature content – as does writer Mike Parker, who has just been appointed as its first-ever official patron. The esteemed author of Map Addict,
The Wild Rover and Mapping the Roads says he can lose whole hours gazing at Geograph. And we know what he means.
“To me, it’s what the internet was invented for: shared knowledge for curious people. It digs deep into the soul of the landscape and shares it around, forging connections that you might never think of without it,” he explains. What fascinates Mike is the tapestry of perspectives that Geograph provides. “Different contributors spot different things. “Some are into history, some know all about transport. Someone will see an ancient field boundary, someone else will spot a modernday farming technique. And the fact you might get all that within the same square kilometre is brilliant. What you get is a really rounded, deep portrait of our land and how it changes.” There’s a game element too: track down a square that hasn’t been photographed, and head out to make it yours. “It makes a tremendous incentive to go for a walk somewhere if you can add to the database while you’re out,” says Mike. “Part of my new role is to encourage people to do that, and to re-photograph squares where the landscape may have changed since the last photo was taken there. Not to replace the older photo, but to sit alongside it and tell the story of change.”
He says people who know about Geograph end up forming a ‘strange and special relationship’ with it.
“I love that,” he adds. “The whole concept just makes me whoop with joy.”