Column: Stuart Maconie

I’m enjoying virtual walks all around the world – but sometimes it’s best to turn the sound off…

The joy (and pain) of virtual walks.

IJUST TOOK a stroll around Venice. One of my favourite city walks actually. Across L’Accademia Bridge and into the heart of Dorsoduro through Campo Santa Margherita, which for my money is the loveliest square in the city. Here you can leave the crowds of Piazza San Marco behind and sit shaded by trees and serenaded by sparrows, and watch the Venetian kids play football and the workmen in their overalls enjoy a vino or café corretto after their shift.

Before that, I walked along the top of the Lickey Hills on the outskirts of Birmingham (less scenic maybe, but more canals than Venice as every pub quizzer knows) and before that I went up Blencathra via Halls Fell Ridge. That was a bit more of a challenge, especially as it was drizzly and pretty wet underfoot and the clag was shifting around disorientatingly on the tops. Also there was this horrible thumping Euro techno music playing all the time, and then occasionally we would lurch disturbingly into twice standard speed.

By now of course, intelligent and perceptive readers such as are common to this magazine will have guessed that I’m talking about virtual tours online. I write these words some four weeks into what we are obliged to call ‘lockdown’. As I write, the nation is staying home and walking local, while signs and ad campaigns across Welsh valley, English dale and Scottish glen urge the tourists not to come.

The last time the outdoors became forbidden to us, during the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001, the internet itself was only used by 36 per cent of British households and YouTube was but a gleam in its inventors’ gimlet eye (founded 2005). This time around, the web (as no-one calls it anymore except journos desperate not to keep saying ‘internet’) is proving utterly invaluable in replacing, however oddly and maybe unsatisfactorily, the parts of life that are now denied us. Last night I clinked a virtual glass and quizzed. (Did you know that Lord Snooty

It may be stretching the notion of ‘country walking’ but Martin Zero’s terrifically enthusiastic YouTube minidocumentaries on the lost rivers, rail tunnels, culverts and canals of Northern England are perfect easy viewing if, like me, you remain impervious to the appeal of Michael Portillo’s cerise flannels. lived in Bunkerton Castle? You do now). And this morning, in a manner of speaking, I have walked.

The first thing to say is that you of course cannot replicate the real feeling of an outdoor walk on a laptop or telly, no matter how massive and state-of-the-art your laptop or telly may be. As I made my virtual way through Venice I couldn’t smell the garlic and tomato of the pizza slices baking in the trattoria ovens or the lovely (sometimes dank) aroma of the canals. On the Lickeys, I got a sense of the deliciously cool Midlands drizzle and the wet swish of the greenery as I walked, but it was only the faintest hint of the real thing. And on Hall’s Fell I never felt the air grow colder as I gained height or the tiny prickle of discomfort at the exposure that adds a hint of seasoning and flavour to a high mountain walk like that one.

That isn’t to say the people uploading these videos (and those watching them) are wasting their time. Even before the pandemic, there were lots of reasons why I’d often dip into these videos and tours. Sometimes it’s just too far out of reach. The Aussies talk about ‘the tyranny of distance’. And the bus service between my house and the Trollheimen ranges of Norway is notoriously unreliable.

And virtual walking is of course, comparatively speaking, safer. As the great Clive James once said of being a TV critic – but equally applicable to sofa-based walking – the only risk of injury is a sprained wrist from reaching too eagerly for the wafer-thin mints.

But uploaders, what is it with you and that awful music? Debussy is out of copyright and thus perfectly usable in your videos. Ravel too. So why are you soundtracking your lovely film about walking the South Downs with some nosebleed rave tune that The Prodigy would reject as being a bit too cheesy? Still, that’s what the mute button is for I guess.

Anyway, it’s nearly a quarter to twelve. Time for a cup of tea and a quick dash up the Trollheimen before lunch I think.